Make Way for Tomorrow

Early start for a busy day, woke up to get into the edit suite early doors and piece together a large chunk of my film after my new hard-drive arrived from Amazon. At least that's what I planned on doing but the mailman never came. In the gap between 11am and 1pm I begun tidying the house so I could do something productive while remaining in earshot of the doorbell, should it ring. So instead I got into a mega cleaning frenzy and just scrubbed down the entire ground floor of our house. Utility room got the most treatment as I pulled out the fridge to give a mop to the horrors the lay underneath and just generally aired out that entire space. So much unclaimed laundry in there, I just bagged it all up and put it in a corner for the others to sort out later. I looked up after completing all of downstairs and realised that I made it to 5pm on just cleaning, lost myself a little bit but I was proud of the work I got done. Granny Sue would certainly be proud to walk through the house now.

That's not to say I didn't get some uni work done. Alongside the film there is a smattering of paperwork to be done to go along with the hand-in of the film so I committed to filling out as much of that as I could. Tomorrow I will go through the footage and mark up which shots are good to use for the edit and do an on-paper edit job so I can really hit the ground running once the hard-drive arrives. no point dawdling.

On top of all that intentional (and somewhat accidental work) I even managed to get a film in. I remember saying to Mark a few weeks ago that I hadn't seen a film in a very long time that really won me over. Radio Days was perhaps the last film I saw that I truly fell in love with, and only now, a year and a half later did I decide to put on Make Way for Tomorrow and it finally happened, I found another film that captivated me.

If you've seen Tokyo Story then the plot may initially feel familiar, an elderly couple are treated like a burden by their children who begrudgingly take them in after the couple's house is repossessed. While Tokyo Story has a highly sombre tone, this film finds a perfect balance between laughs and  humanity without feeling contrived in either department. It's also rare to see a film from 1937 maintain this tone all the way through to the end, there is not a single moment where it doesn't drop the ball or overplay its hand (Anomalisa could learn something here), it sticks to it's simple core right through to the end and its permanently compelling. At moments I didn't know whether I should laugh or cry - often I did both.