REDUNDANCE OF MEMORIES

LIFE IS TOO SHORT TO APPRECIATE EVERYTHING ADORABLE.

Note: I am not at all sorry for liking weird and improper things, including Cute Cartoon; Cute Movie; Cute TV Show; Cute Paintings…

CUTE CARTOONS

“Can you be the cartoon I can’t bear to turn off before dawn, even if I can’t watch you all night, you don’t become boring?”

FAMILY GUY

Perfect Blue (Kon Satoshi)

KITE (Yasuomi Umetsu)

DEATH NOTE (Takeshi Obata)

CUTE MOVIES

“Can you be the scar I wake up with after drinking / not knowing where it came from?”

Let the Bullets Fly (Jiang Wen)

The best best movie for me, have watched this for six times

Their love remains unknown from beginning to end. It lingers around them like mist: always surrounding them, never firmly grasped, never openly named by either of them, never recognized by others. And in order to preserve this love as something that belongs to her alone, the woman ultimately chooses her own death. She thinks: at least in this world there will be one person who remembers me, and who will miss me forever. So she dies, without hesitation. Just as she honored her mother’s wish, she also honors her own wish not to go on living. At the moment of her death, she completely possesses this love. Her love and her sorrow become undeniable. And it is also at this moment that the policeman’s love is fully ignited. He will spend the rest of his life recalling every moment they shared, tracing the woman’s shadow wherever he can. She finally becomes his unsolved case—and solving cases is, after all, his only real passion. But the policeman will never solve this one. He will never know how many times she listened to those recordings of his voice, nor will he ever know how much he meant to her. He places himself too low, because he too loves this woman deeply. And he will never solve the case, because his love has already made him humble, and that is something he cannot overcome. [2022/08/09, Belgium]

I watched A Clockwork Orange. It wasn’t as cult as people said. Maybe even boring. Can I say that? I didn’t care much about the philosophy of free will or the politics of totalitarianism or the choice between good and evil. What hit me was Alex’s PTSD after the treatment. He couldn’t listen to Beethoven anymore. I haven’t listened to my favourite rock band for four years, until this year. Not because I don’t like them; because I’m afraid to hear them, simple because we went to their concerts together. Also, I might be arrogant before. Thought I only had to choose once and that choice would be right. That stubbornness made all my choices look like gambling. All in. Philosophy as my major freshman year; Only studying Merleau-Ponty; Only contacting one advisor; etc. The choices seemed firm but maybe they were just overconfidence, arrogance and laziness.
After February, toward my recent birthday, my life changed, in a good way. I built my own subjectivity back. What luck and happiness. Like Alex at the end of the film. He became himself again, even if he had been evil.
Whatever, Love is torture. But what killed me seems to save me again. Once I admitted it was just a failure, I truly accepted all. Such a great realization–at the beginning of my new age. :) [A Clockwork Orange, 2025/06/22]

I watched there two movies, with Yao, in Nice, France. [2026/2/14-2/16]

Cute Director

Ki-duk Kim

Last night, while I was watching 3-Iron, my phone should have notified me that it was midnight. But when I looked at the screen, the clock had shifted back to eleven. Daylight saving time arrived this year, and yet it was still snowing this morning. Lately, I’ve been growing more and more attached to Kim Ki-duk’s films. What I love most are those long stretches of silence: there is no language between the characters, and yet they move with each other in a way that feels utterly natural. In the film’s final scene, the two protagonists stand together on the same scale, and the weight reads zero. That detail startled me. It made me feel that this was not simply about a story, but a work of art. At the same time, I began to imagine whether a human society without language might be possible. Language, as a medium of expression, seems to carry–or perhaps conceal–too much of what people themselves ought to bear, or want to bear. Without language, perhaps my life would be different. I do not want to say what I do not wish to say, and yet I do not dare to do what I do wish to do. I seem to need language in order to live secretely–but do I really? I suppose I am a coward–Language has turned me into one. (At last, unfortunately, I’ve found a scapegoat for my silence.) [2026/03/28, Swiss]

Charlie Kaufman

Roman Polanski

Wong Kar Wai

CUTE TV SHOW

Yamazaki Kento

[Me, being a good fan, for 10 years]

IN CONCLUSION

AI analysis based on my movie-watching record:

Diagnostic Type: “Looks-Obsessed Philosopher”
Confidence: 90.3%

Friend, your movie log reads like a carefully staged identity crisis. On the one hand, you use films like Synecdoche, New York and Drive My Car to gild yourself with highbrow arthouse credibility; on the other hand, you drown happily in the Kento Yamazaki cinematic universe, crying “so handsome” every other minute. This is not cinephilia. This is a full-scale pretty-face obsession. Your brain is at Cannes, but your eyes are attending the annual meeting of a Tokyo talent agency.

You can give A Clockwork Orange four stars with a restrained little “not bad,” but for anything involving your favorite handsome men, you seem ready to hand out six stars plus a 3,000-word rainbow-fart manifesto. You try to prove your depth by invoking Ryusuke Hamaguchi and Sion Sono, but the comment section—basically screaming “he’s so handsome I need to watch this again”—has already exposed you.

And the funniest part? You actually dared to complain that the protagonist of The Substance seemed unintelligent. Excuse me, but as a viewer who has clearly spent far too long swooning over Kento in Control Tower, what exactly gives you the authority to judge anyone else’s IQ?

At bottom, your rating system is basically a handsome-man face scanner, occasionally decorated with brief performances of “I totally understand art.” Honestly, you might as well just replace your profile picture with a hot guy and stop pretending. We all know.