I am reminded of another reason I put away my blog. My life is fairly boring, even to me, who lives it, and the stuff that is not boring (my relationship, bizarre things that happen on the job) isn't repeatable. I'll make one exception today- a coworker tried to send me a transcript of some inane conversation he'd heard between the office manager and one of the salespeople. Unfortunately he accidentally sent it to the office manager, who shares my first name. The transcript doesn't reflect poorly on the office manager, it's really about the high decibel idiocy of the other guy, but the nickname chosen for him, taken from the character list of HBO's The Wire does. He appears to be taking it well, but I don't think he's seen the show yet, and I'm sure he's checking HBO's sadly complete character guides now.

Speaking of office politics, last night I saw Ikiru by Akira Kurosawa.
In its broad strokes, it's in the genre of "Yuppie Redeemed by Life
Changing Event" that plagued us through the 90s (in fact IMDB lists
"Life as a House" as a remake). Kanji, a successful bureaucrat, played
with mournful eyes by Takashi Shimura learns that he's dying of stomach
cancer and has left than six months to live and he realizes he hasn't
been living at all and that his son hates him. He goes on a wild night
on the town, flirts with a coworker played by Miki Odagiri who calls him
"the mummy" and eventually rededicates his life to forcing the stale
bureaucracy of Tokyo circa 1952 to build a park. Although you could come
out of there with a message of stereotypical uplift, that's not where
the film's interest lies. What we see of the effort to get the park
built is in flashback during his wake, from the drunken perspective of
the various functionaries he cajoled into building it, and it quickly
descends into squabling. He never makes up with his son or even tells
him he's dying, a decision the son calls "cruel" at the funeral. More
than any other movie about missed opportunities, Ikiru focuses on what's
beyond repair, on the lingering sadness, on how Kanji feels "darkness
everywhere, and nothing for me to hold onto, no matter how hard I try."
Even the scenes of him going on the town with a novelist have a bleak
feel- and there's a disorientation in Odagiri's eyes as he wanders busy
strip clubs and dancehalls in Tokyo that may have influenced Lost in
Translation.

The office politics in the film is done in broad, comical strokes (there's a montage at the beginning of a bureacratic buck being passed that's as completely predictable as it is brilliantly shot.) Kurosawa paints his society from the outside, but that's how he paints Kanji too, giving our first view of him through narration and gossip that insults him before letting us in, and then again returning to our view of him from the outside, as we can now see others through their reaction to him.

(Don't really have a conclusion here, just wanted to get a few thoughts up while the film was fresh in my mind.)

By the way, if comments are closed off on a post, it's not because of
any deliberate action- it's because there's a bug with the new blogger
feature that allows you to e-mail your posts into blog that seems to not
activate the comments for that post. I'll go back and correct them when
I get a chance.