Struck up a conversation with a backpacker from south England coming to Sri Lanka. Apparently he is going to help the sea turtles lay their eggs or something. He had to run across the overgrown mall that is Instanbul airport and asked me if I had internet to connect to his friend in SL. Seemed like a nice lad of about twenty-five, answered some of his questions about Sri Lanka throughout the flight. Asked for my WhatsApp and last I texted he’s doing fine and was excited for his journey despite the heat. Wished more people were talkative as him, made the flight much less boring than it would be otherwise.
Watched a couple Japanese movies on the flight too.
exit 8 was a neat concept and I think I have seen YouTube shorts with the same concept but at the same time it was a bit simplistic theme wise, in a feel good kind of way.
Rewrite and I have a S/E/C/R/E/T are both high school romance movies with something supernatural about them slightly. But you can read the synopsis in the screenshots.
Riraito/rewrite is unsurprisingly based on a novel given how the prominent role which novels play in it kind of romanticised being a novelist. Even tho it came out in 2025, it felt kind of nostalgic which also makes sense since the book is from 2012. It’s also nostalgic because you get to see the characters in their high school years but also as adults grumbling about getting older. The successful novelist main character is married as well and the character who plays her is 30.
As for I have a secret it felt like more straightforwardly a movie aimed at high schoolers rather than people who have been to high school. As for the novel it’s been adapted from, it’s by the same author as I want to eat your pancreas, which also got adapted to a semi-popular anime movie which I will release a blog post about.
The limited film selection on flight entertainment systems forces me to watch Japanese films which I would otherwise overlook, and which I have heard nothing about. This is one of the things I look forward to the most when going on a flight. Honestly I don’t even know if there is a way to watch these movies online, but as a note for my future self I will say right now that I don’t feel like any of these films are worth rewatching. Maybe once I learn to read Japanese then I can read the novels but I doubt it’ll happen cause to truly enjoy them you need to have the time on your hands and lack of urgency which I lack these now. Like I am too bothered about paying my bills and other stuff than to worry about micromanaging the relationships with school friends which is kind of what the characters in I have a secret do. I also think a major obstacle to my enjoyment is also that I no longer feel like the bonding youthful activitities which the characters engage in, like going on a school trip or watching fireworks at a local festival (in riraito), to be that interesting or desirable. In fact, I view them as tropes in fiction at this point to understand them. Although I will say that the hero show play which the students put up in the I have a secret looked pretty fun and was certainly the best scene in the film. I can’t say that I found the character’s speech about how, the saddest thing is when people can’t forgive themselves for their mistakes, to be particularly compelling but maybe I would have if I was younger, because it would have been the truth then.
I have not entirely disawoved myself from the view that the youth knows what the truth is because they haven’t grown numb to life yet and they possess the right instincts towards life. So I do wonder what the cast feels like in productions like these. Obviously it’s a show put on by older adults, and the fact that they are acting out their youth in public as a performance actually separates them from the ‘true’ experience of youth untainted by performative acts informed by nostalgia of the author. On the other hand they have been handpicked to represent the best and ideal and most momentous version of youth which the intended audience is either supposed to long for or see themselves in already. So much of fiction is informed by the thought of the demographic it is aimed, a thought which states: “Wouldn’t it be cool if x happened…’
i guess the distinguishing feature of this youth themed stories is not that the characters are not goal oriented but rather that their goals are oriented towards their school relationships and romances, even when there is some other distant goal what it serves is the goal of furthering the bonds between the characters. I guess it’s because your friend relationships are the most important when you are in school.
i hear people who didn’t do well in school socially say that it never changes, and perhaps it is so, but the earnestness with which people seek each other certainly changes, as our goals and priorities change to become more financially and career motivated. There are advantages to this, and the wisdom of maturity comes from an habituation to unwelcome and welcome changes, we play the long game as each days gets shorter and less unique, but the price is the intensity of feeling which is unique to first time youthful encounters which can never be replicated, even if you were a god who could return to your youth. Speaking of Gods, if such beings were to exist I wonder if they feel things faintly or at all and whether they are just numb to everything due to a lack of new experiences or thoughts or feelings. Could a god feel first love ever again? That would explain the indifference to suffering in the world but then again I am no theologian or philosopher…
The time looper is also inherently a kind of minor analogy to a god in that sense, although in riraito the boy from the future doesn’t seem to grow tired of people just because he is repeating the same script with multiple different characters. However, as for me, I felt a bit bored, because I had already seen it done, although in not exactly the same exact details, in Steins;Gate.