at one time or another.

At least that’s what i think. One song that I thought about at the end of the movie is John Mayer’s In Repair.

Doctors fix their patients by putting chemicals into their body to re-establish the kinda balance needed for them to function properly. Carpenters fix broken furnitures by reattaching those broken legs and missing screws. And every tangibles need some form of fix every once in a while. It could be an external blemish or an internal instability.

Movie mainly talks about post traumatic stress disorder after losing the whole family during the 9/11. Guilty are the ones left behind, painfully holding on to every little details left behind. It’s like a painful wound (and in this case, a huge one), it hurts yet you wanna touch it hoping that it hurts less knowing that it wouldn’t. But you do know that wounds don’t heal if you keep touching it. It was a difficult and delicate subject to maneuver, but I think this 2007 movie just managed to pull it off well.

曾经有一个小小的社会新闻，四个男孩子相偕去戏水，结果大浪一来，三个人死掉了，只剩下一个活着游回来。报纸上谈论著死掉的那三个孩子，而我急切地找活着的那一个：怎么没有他的名字呢？怎么没有人告诉我只剩下他活下来之后、他过得怎么样呢？

大家都替死的人感到难过，我却一直在想，活下来的那一个，一下子失去了三个好朋友，他会不会孤单？
　　
所以我有了《沉睡的青春》。
　　
沉睡，说的不是青春的消逝，而是生命的孤寂，可是却用一种带着诗意的甜美浪漫被呈现出来，原因是我并不想再增加生命的悲伤，相反地，我想疗伤，静静地、缓缓地、帮忙那些有遗憾的生命找到存在的力量。

— 导演 郑芬芬

出现在电影的话:

　有些人对时间的流逝 感到遗憾
　有些人则深陷其中 永远也逃不出来

　存在也许无法被证明
　灵魂的重量却可以被创造

YouTube

Time’s gone by, sometimes you look for the closest evidence that you’ve grown up indeed. Most of the time, after a couple of vindications, followed by a couple of false dawns, you wonder if those are mere illusions accidentally happening at the same time.

Chungking Express aka 重庆森林 is a 1994 film. I was 9 years old during 1994. Couldn’t have watched this movie then. I probably watched this during one of the movie’s rerun on tv somewhere between the mid to late nineties. I was very young then, and I thought this film is boring. Just a couple of whirl-ish camera angles. Besides, I never really understood what’s going on exactly. So my memory of this movie is pretty vague. Almost dreamlike – I think it really took place, but i can never be too sure.

Fast-forward 15 years on, I’m 24 years old this year, the age of Takeshi Kaneshiro’s character in the movie (with no intention to attempt to draw any possible comparison. I swear I’ll never try. Just unbeautifully imperfect coincidence that’s all.) I think I’ve probably watched parts of this movie during one of those reruns on local tv over the past 15 years, but again, I’m not too sure.

Just on this fine evening, I suddenly thought of Mijung, who had gone missing, and I decided to watch this movie properly once more in its whole entirety. 1 hour 37 minutes, I enjoyed it. Like how I enjoyed 2046 though a lot of people still hates me for dragging them to the theatre for that movie. That’s the surest sign of growing up. That the kinetic motion on your clock is no illusion. It feels like over the years, all you’re doing is accumulating experiences, your imaginations and your thoughts. When you reach a certain amount of quota, you gain access to different understandings. You began to understand things that you never used to understand.

Like the retirement speech I heard this morning, if life is divided into 3 stages, I’m probably at the brink of the 1st stage, sauntering awkwardly into the 2nd. Gaining the number of candles on my birthday cake seems exciting. Surely more heartbreaks ahead along the way, but all of these are slowly easing me into the better understanding of the next great movie.

- – -
internship…about 30 working days left. I’m not a great fan of countdowns. I didn’t even really do it for my ORD. But this time, I truly felt that I’ve overstayed my welcome.