Go

Saw my first festival movie last night. The challenge with going to a film festival is picking the good ones. From reading the program or the catalog, you can’t really tell which are good and which are bad. My strategy this year is to pick the movies that are showing when I have time to go (being a busy parent); it seems that it depends on your luck anyway, so it’s not worth trying too hard. What I do, though, is to avoid movies that will get regular distribution; I don’t care about seeing movies before everyone else – it would be a pity to waste all those movies you won’t get a chance to see in a theater again.

Anyway, I had luck with my first movie: Go by Isao Yukisada. I can only describe it as a Japanese feel-good movie and say I’d recommend it. I think it’s difficult to review fiction: either you spoil the movie or you can’t say so much about it; and when you really like a movie, other people think it’s bad or nothing special. But I liked this one: it was well-balanced between being serious and funny, and although it was about the problems of being Korean in Japan, it felt like the filmmakers didn’t take the making of the movie too seriously – which I think might be a recipe for success.

Go and see Go.