Too Tired to Die

A film with a really interesting premise and obviously some provocative ideas behind it. Unfortunately it goes nowhere from there and particularly towards the end becomes tiresome and violent.

The best part of the film is by far the character of Death played by Mira Sorvino.

It's about death, this movie, and the struggle to find meaning to one's life, when having only a few hours to do it. Big subjects, indeed, worthy of a great artist - needing one, really. Writer/director Chin doesn't suffice.

The film plays with classic themes, related to this topic - such as the chess game with the reaper in Bergman's 'Seventh Seal'. Bergman's knight loses the game, but wins the lives of those he has learned to hold dear. In this movie, nothing is gained, and so one wonders: is anything at all lost?

There's an interesting atmosphere in the film, sort of an arty New York setting through an immigrant's eyes, but neither that nor anything else is really followed through. What must be meant to have some profound undercurrent, remains just surface - and a quickly sketched surface, at that. It would have been better to make this film a pure comedy.

Kenji (Takeshi Kaneshiro) is a Japanese guy living in New York. He spends his days at a local coffee shop. He encounters his mysterious dream girl (Mira Sorvino). She is death and she reveals that he has twelve hours to live.

This is an experimental indie. There is some surrealism but it struck me as fake unreality. One thing that doesn't help is the guy's heavy accent. It actually grew to annoy me. The acting ranges from amateurish to some recognizable veterans like Jeffrey Wright, Michael Imperioli, and Ben Gazzara. This is strictly indie time. It would help to have some better cinematic style. Newbie director Wonsuk Chin tries a few moves but they come off looking amateurish.

The aimless protagonist is an all too believable character, and therefore there is considerable empathy for him, even when his behavior is not justifiable. This film really gave me something to think about; how many people would do better than Kenji if given 24 hours to put their life in order? In traditional Hollywood, everything would miraculously work out fine, but of course Wonsuk Chin knows better than that. This is a case where I think a bitter flavor is better than sweetness. Not all of the loosely-linked scenes work, and Sorvino can grate at times, but on the whole the movie is very much worth seeing. The opening is wonderful.

The premise for the movie has been done, or at least has been "heard" to have been done in films like "Life or Something Like it. The difference here is what happens, or more specifically what doesn't happen, and in my opinion, this film is far more superior.

Kaneshiro plays Kenji - the tragic hero of the movie, who is informed by Death that he has less than 24 hours to live. I forget the exact number. The subsequent actions follow him around for the next day, and allows the audience to see what he would do with that knowledge.

People may find this movie pretentious or more precisely that "nothing happens." And they're all right. However, if one were to take the time to digest the film after watching it, you will realize the deeper truths that it reveals. Please excuse me if this sounds artsy-fartsy.

If you were told that you had one day to live by Death, I think many of us would react very much like the main character: be consumed by disbelief and inertia and "waste" time by doing nothing. I think it's more hits closer to home than we would like to admit.

Unfortunately, life isn't just filled with earth-shattering revelations and exciting flashy monologues, unlike Scrooge in a Christmas Carol. It's mainly us - filled with our thoughts. We are not the consummate Shakespearian tragic hero with one huge flaw. People have many little ones. And the meaning of life and all our problems can't be solved in one night, no matter how romantic that ideal might be.

Oddly enough, I find this film to be a slice-of-life and quite realistic, despite the premise. Kenji goes into a coffee shop regularly to find a man sitting there alway reading a novel by some great author. Kenji often watches him but is afraid to approach him, to ask him what novel he is always reading. With his newfound knowledge of his impending death, Kenji does things he wouldn't normally do, which is obligatory in such films. However, the revelations that are "revealed" for a lack of a better word, are not big deals, but are instead, little insights to what makes us truly human - pretension, postering, lies and how we pretend to be more than we truly are.

I really liked the casting of Kaneshiro. He has that listless artist look to him, that fits the character very well. However, I really disliked Sorvino, as I thought her whole motive for taking the role was to showcase her knowledge of the Mandarin language.

So ultimately, this is a hard film to review and even describe. It is slow. It can leave viewers with a sad emptiness. For some reason, it reminds of the novel, "Flesh and Blood" by Michael Cunningham and maybe even "The Rules of Attraction" by Bret Easton Ellis. You see the flaws of characters very clearly. You feel as if you hadn't learn anything about them except that they are unmotivated and vain creatures - things which you already are informed in the opening sequence. Therefore, it came as a complete surprise at the end of the movie, the amount of emotion I felt. So I think the film succeeded in drawing emotions that I wasn't even sure were there, perhaps it is the empathy we feel for ourselves and each other.