Kurosawa’s ‘Ikiru’ Comes Back to Life in ‘Living’
'Living' dives into many themes that we can all understand regardless of our cultural backgrounds. We can see this through the shared similarities between 'Ikiru' and 'Living'.

'Living' dives into many themes that we can all understand regardless of our cultural backgrounds. We can see this through the shared similarities between 'Ikiru' and 'Living'.
Mark Anthony Green was unable to connect all of the pieces in his debut feature film, leaving Opus as a middling entry in an already oversaturated genre.
If you've watched 'Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles', you are either someone who believes “nothing happens” in this three and half-hour film or you’re like me who believes everything happens.
“Trust your gut" is one of the most common pieces of advice you’ll receive during your lifetime. And as a person inclined to trust my intuition above all else, it’s the most common advice I find myself giving in real life and in my online socialising. But what happens when your gut is trying to warn you that something is seriously wrong without you being able to identify what triggered it in the first place? How can you act on a feeling or make it go away when you don’t have a clue about what could be wrong? How can you trust your intuition when you don’t know what makes it act out in the first place?
These confines won’t really encourage you to read the film as a metaphor for the nerve-inducing experience we’ve all been through over the last year, however — and in the interest of maintaining your dignity, you probably shouldn’t. While the sociopolitical commentary may have worked for the similarly-themed Buried (2010), in which we find Ryan Reynolds on his own buried alive in the Middle East, but this futuristic take on the premise is best left as a piece of distracting entertainment. Nevertheless, the atmosphere is no less suffocating, literally and dramatically.