Ashita no kioku

I saw this movie at the Waterfront Film Festival in Saugatuck, MI. It was so well done. The producer was there and to everyones surprise, he was American. He explained to us that Ken Watanabe is like Clint Eastwood over in Japan. He said that Ken was reading the book of this story and really wanted to make it. He also said that the Japanese have only really seen him do Samurai movies and that this was apart from what they usually see him in. This movie won the Japanese equivalent to the best motion picture Oscar. But of course here, no nod in the foreign film category. It is emotionally stirring, visually stunning and extremely well acted. There is no moment in the film where things feel sappily cliché' or manipulative. It is a pure film about its topic. I would definitely recommend this to anyone. Please watch, and enjoy.

I just saw this film at the AFI Film Festival and it hits you on a deep emotional level. I am lucky that I have not had anyone in my family suffering from Alzheimer's, but the film works because it is also contains universal issues about lost love, honor and unspoken feelings within a family. I pretty much cried through the last half of the movie. Ken Watanabe was there after the screening for Q&A. He secured the rights to the book himself, then found the writer and director. His executive producer credit is well earned, and Watanabe just further cements proof of his great acting talents. What could have been a made-for-TV movie in the U.S. is a poignant story for the big screen with a superb level of execution.

This is the first movie to feature Ken Watanabe in the lead role. This may come as a surprise to many of us who've seen Ken in movies like "The Last Samurai", and other Japanese movies. He was the star in these movies, but surprise to learn that he was never the lead actor until this movie.

In fact, Ken was the one who've suggested to make the novel of the same title by Hiroshi Ogiwara into a movie. He saw similarity between himself who had a bout with leukemia with the main character of the novel Masayuki Saeki. The movie that was the first film to feature him as its star won the Japanese Academy Award for 2006.

This is a good movie that portrays the life of 49 year old middle aged executive who contracts Alzheimer's disease at the peak of his career. The confusion, and desperation of the man who's career is about to be taken away from him, and the courage him and his wife shows to combat the life that's before them is more suspenseful than your average action movie. The kind of courage and dignity the main character Saeki has is probably what Ken Watanabe has as a person as well.

Ken Watanabe is brilliant in this movie, and its worth every minute of your time to see him in action.

A movie should stand on its own, and "Memories of Tomorrow" does, but it's closely associated - at least in this viewer's mind - with three recent outstanding films:

• Sarah Polley's "Away from Her"

• Clint Eastwood's "Letters from Iwo Jima"

• Alain Corneau's "Fear and Trembling"

As "Away from Her," "Memories of Tomorrow" is about Alzheimer's. In fact, Yukihiko Tsutsumi's film from Hiroshi Ogiwara's novel came out in Japan last year, at the same time Polley's film, with Julie Christie, had its first screening in her native Canada.

No copycat business here, the two are exact contemporaries, both arriving in the U.S. this year. However, Polley's film is not at all what you'd expect from the topic, Tsutsumi's is.

The star of "Iwo Jima" was Ken Watanabe, one of the best-known actors in Japan, but also known in this country from "Memoirs of a Geisha," "Batman Begins," and "The Last Samurai." Watanabe is the end- and be-all of "Memories of Tomorrow," on screen, and acting up a storm, pretty much two hours straight.

"Fear and Trembling" gave a visceral, stomach-punching picture of Japan's super-intense, near-sadistic "salaryman" mentality, the world of 18-hour days, total dependence on the job, and numerous instances of karo-shi, or death from overwork.

The character Watanabe plays in "Memories of Tomorrow," a mid-level executive in a big ad agency, is on top of that cruel food chain, but is getting chewed up himself in the process, neglecting his wife (the luminous Kanako Higuchi, whose career goes back to the 1989 Zatoichi), his pregnant and yet-to-be-married daughter, and pretty much everything else.

Unlike the large strokes and many implied acts and facts in "Away from Her," the onset and development of Alzheimer's in the Japanese film is detailed, explicit, repetitive - and quite unnecessary. One original touch is showing how the illness has a kind of positive effect on the patient, slowing down and humanizing him.

After the utter humiliation of realizing his incompetence (in the single-virtue office environment), the Watanabe character is discovering life's simple pleasures, and long-neglected relationships. These bright spots in the oncoming darkness (and Higuchi's presence) lift the film from what otherwise would be an unrelievedly grim experience.

If "Memories of Tomorrow" seems like "The Notebook," it's because the cinematic adaptation of a novel by Hiroshi Ogiwara deals with the dreaded Alzheimer's disease as it slowly eats away at Masayuki Saeki's (Ken Watanabe) memories and, therefore, life, a process foreshadowed by an image in its opening credits of buildings being constructed played in reverse such that they appear to be deconstructing. Yet the similarity with Nick Cassavetes' sudsy interpretation of Nicholas Sparks' novel end there, as director Yukihiko Tsutsumi, barring a manipulative second act, presents the film's first hour set in corporate Tokyo with such rhythmic precision and expert framing that the urgency of Masayuki's anger and panic over his gradual descent into senility is masterfully portrayed.

A go-getting manager at a top ad agency, Masayuki, just a few months shy of his 50th birthday, has landed a major deal with a client and along with a doting wife Emiko (Kanako Haguchi) and a soon-to-be-married daughter Rie (Kazue Fukiishi), his life isn't just stable; it's an enviable accomplishment. Yet because he keeps on forgetting his clients' names, the highway exit to his daughter's house, and pretty much every trivial details in his life, he sees a doctor as Emiko suggests, where he learns that he suffers the early stages of Alzheimer's Disease.

As typified by one sequence where Masayuki gets lost in Shibuya, Tsutsumi deftly captures his protagonist's mad dash effort to make sense of both his external and internal environment, be it finding his way to the office, or remembering where his marketing team sat during an Italian lunch, or contemplating whether to jump from a ledge upon his disease's confirmation. Tsustumi radically differs in pacing and tone during the latter half as -- after a cheery montage of Masayuki's newfound domestic life following his early retirement -- he deliberates on the emotional and psychological issues of Masayuki, who now removed from the daily stress of urban life, finds it hard to adjust. Insistently stating the fragility of the human mind and human relationships with recurring images of potteries, china wares and cups, Tsutsumi eventually leaves the film to simmer in a treacly syrup which, while admittedly touching, leaves a bitter aftertaste.