歩いても歩いても and Joy Division

歩いても歩いても ("Aruitemo Aruitemo") is one of the movies I took in at the Vancouver International Film Festival this week. (An aside: the English title is "Still Walking".) The star of the movie is Abe Hiroshi. Yes, that actor who starred in Trick with Nakama Yukie, the TV series "Dragon Zakura" and, yes, "Godzilla 2000", amongst a bunch of other TV shows and movies. Anyways, there is a scene in the movie where his character is sitting in his old room in his parents home wondering why they bothered to haul out all of his old belongings. Amongst the things in the room was a poster on the wall: a poster with the "JOY DIVISION" across the top and the cover art from that band's LP "Unknown Pleasures" below that. For whatever reason my mind crossed the line between "It's just a prop" and into the territory of "What is the significance of that poster being there". Of course there was no significance in the poster being there. It was simply there because it's old and something that a youth in the late 1970s/early 1980s Japan might have acquired. Anyways, that prop proved to be a bit of a distraction for me because it got me wondering whether or not I still have that Joy Division "Love Will Tear Us Apart" poster I bought oh so many years ago. Luckily, for the sake of my enjoying the rest of the movie, I didn't dwell too much on that thought for too long.

PS: Okay. With respect to the write-up the film got on the VIFF web site: Sorry Tony Rayns but I never thought of Abe Hiroshi as being a "comedic actor". The TV series "Dragon Zakura" was hardly an exercise in slapstick. But that's just my observation...