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Nine Days (2020)
Hollow, plagiarized version of Kore-eda's "After Life"
Review has both spoilers for "Nine Days" and "After Life" (1998).
If you have not seen "After Life" (1998), and watched only "Nine Days", then you may give compliments to the director for thinking up such a thought-provoking concept. Director Edson Oda openly admits to being inspired by "After Life" while writing the script and trying to "evoke the same feelings" as "After Life", which is why I was interested to watch this movie. Unfortunately the word "inspiration" is really not accurate, because Oda practically copied every detail of "After Life" with the only major difference being pre-birth instead of after-death.
Oda copied so many ideas of "After Life" (will refer to from now on as AL) that I was surprised there was no credit given to Hirokazu Kore-eda (that I noticed) in the film.
First we have a character (Will) who has already lived life and has a job in this sort of purgatory world interviewing souls. This is the same idea as AL, except the latter had more people doing this work, and their motive for the interviews was different. Even the same style of interview snippets shown is used.
Will spends most of his time watching people live through their point-of-view on his many TV screens. He records their lives on VHS. Oda even copied this concept from AL, down to using the same video recording format.
Then of course Will has some special interest in one of the people he watches and obsesses rewatching the VHS recordings, which is quite similar to one of the characters in AL who grieves his past relationship and also watches VHS recordings he finds of his lover. The difference is AL doesn't let this subplot completely control the rest of the story.
Just to throw some extra plagiarism in and pull on the viewer's heartstrings, Will gives the souls he rejects a parting gift of one last experience of their choosing that he recreates for them. Like, he physically builds the sets and makes them feel all of the sensations, the exact same way as AL. This is a blatant and disgraceful copy of AL - and what's even more embarrassing is that Oda couldn't think of some other way for the souls to exit after their experience, he just re-uses the same concept of AL, where they disappear in front of our eyes. But why do the souls have to go away at all if this is pre-birth? Do souls just keep being endlessly "born" and thrown in 9-day competition whenever someone on Earth dies? The character Kyo is just a soul with no previous life either, yet he somehow stays in purgatory permanently. Why aren't the souls who desperately begged Will to not have to leave given this same opportunity? It's all for dramatic effect, and just leaves me with more questions. If you have seen AL, you know the souls who haven't found peace and don't want to "move on" are able to stay in purgatory to work, though they are discouraged from doing that. Meanwhile "Nine Days" blindly copies the experience recreation without creating any logic for it in this pre-life purgatory world.
Thankfully the foul feces story at the end of the film around the dinner table was NOT a copy of anything from AL, that is in fact Oda's original idea and should tell you everything you need to know about how much originality he has. Talking in detail about scrubbing feces in a toilet with a toothbrush and then brushing teeth with it. That's what he decides to throw into his spiritual film.
Besides all of the plagiarism, Will is just an insufferable character throughout. He shows hardly any empathy or warmth towards the souls, some have no comfort in their final moments. A stark contrast to AL. "Nine Days" was mostly about Will making poor decisions while playing God, and the stories of the other characters were an afterthought. I guess that's what happens when you go through copying ideas without fully understanding their purpose. The contrast between Emma (Zazie Beetz) and Kane (Bill Skarsgard) was interesting but hardly explored like I expected it to be when they were the final two contendors, and the final scene left me rolling my eyes into the back of my head, instead of pondering and appreciating life like I did after viewing AL.
Great Expectations (2012)
Dull and poorly cast
I watched this after just finishing the book, and wanted to see how this story comes to life... Poor acting, poor casting, poorly structured and I think anyone who has not read the original story would probably be confused or bored at what exactly is the point or importance of certain scenes because they cut many things out. It seems like they tossed random memorable bits of the book in without any depth. I should've stopped watching as soon as Joe came on screen, Jason Flemyng is not a convincing Joe whatsoever, the opposite of the character in the book and acted as if he was forced into the role. Pip is lifeless throughout with none of the wit or faults from the book, I couldn't care less about his portrayal here. Robbie Coltrane as Mr Jaggers is just a bizarre choice and I agree with the other reviewer who said he would've been better cast as Pumblechook. The only major characters who seemed to be okay for casting was Estella and Miss Havisham. This story has too much nuance to be captured well in a single film and some odd changes to the overall plot / characters.
There's hardly any time spent setting up how initially disgusted Pip is with Magwitch, and how he grows fond of him over time, and at the same time starts empathizing with Joe. In general the whole story theme of Pip humbling himself is a huge miss in this adaptation. Something else that stood out to me as a weird choice was Pip being aggressive towards Mr Jaggers near the end when asking about Estella's lineage - very out of character for Pip, who was always intimidated by Mr Jaggers the bigshot lawyer throughout the book. Similarly he was unforgiving towards Miss Havisham which is not true to the story, storming off like a toddler, and they stupidly also modified a plotpoint so that she accidentally sets herself on fire instead of purposefully, thus taking away the magnitude of her grief. Overall, bad, I couldn't peel my eyes from the book, but watching this I started multitasking 10 minutes in.