A Short Post

Last night a friend and I went to see "La La Land".  It's only playing for a brief run here where I live...about 10 days.  I suppose anyone who really wanted to see it has already done so.  Two of my students saw it a month and half ago.  One went to Sendai ("That's the only place where it's playing", she said).  Another saw it it Yamagata.  Interestingly enough, she saw it only a few days after the first student.  Not sure what was going on there.

After the movie was over, I asked my friend if she had enjoyed it.  She said she liked it...but mentioned that musicals are probably a hard sell in Japan.  "A lot of people just don't understand why characters in musicals have to sing about what's happening in the story", she said.  I don't know if that was the first time I had heard that comment but I could see where it was coming from.

Today when I mentioned I had seen "La La Land" to an acquaintance at lunchtime, she went spouted off exactly, almost verbatim, the observation my friend had made last night.  The coincidence certainly caught me off guard.  Then she mentioned how she was a bit put off when she saw "Frozen", which was titled "Anna and the Snow Queen" in Japanese, and found out that it had singing in it too.  I casually offered the observation "When's the last time you saw a Disney cartoon without singing in it?".  She stopped for a moment and said "Hmm, good point".....

-*-

Life has been up and down and up recently.  Things were fine during Golden Week but I caught a cold at the tail end of that.  It took about two weeks to shake it off...just in time to take my mom and sister around while they were in town for a weekend.  The weather was hot then...both a blessing and a curse.  Vancouverites are not prepared to 30 degree weather in late May.  But the sights are much nicer in sunny weather.....