Dear My Life

  Header illustration for the review essay of The Half of It (2020) . Illustration created for editorial review purposes. 💭 Short Personal Reflection The Half of It (2020) opens with a question that has stayed with me ever since: what if we've been telling the wrong love story all along? The film begins with Plato's Symposium — the idea that humans were once whole, split apart by the gods, and have spent their lives searching for the missing half. It is a beautiful myth. But watching Ellie Chu move through her quiet, self-sufficient world, I found myself wondering whether the real story of love is not about finding someone to complete us, but about learning to recognize ourselves more fully. Living life, I have come to believe that the hardest thing is not loving another person — it is learning how to inhabit oneself. This film understands that, and it holds that understanding with extraordinary gentleness. As a Netflix coming-of-age film, The Half of It explores identity...

  Header illustration for the review essay of Extraordinary Attorney Woo (2022) . Illustration created for editorial review purposes. 💭 Short Personal Reflection Extraordinary Attorney Woo (2022) brought me back to a question I have been sitting with for decades. On my desk, there sits a small box. Until it is opened, no one knows what lies inside. When I first began teaching, the children in front of me felt just like those boxes — expressing the world in unfamiliar ways, and I often found myself pausing, unable to fully understand them. But as ten, twenty years passed, I learned not to open those boxes too quickly, but to gently trace their edges first. And then, one day, I realized: when I finally looked inside, what I found were not "problems" — but individuals living in their own unique ways. In the end, no one is perfect. What matters is not what lies inside the box, but how we choose to see it. 🎥 Drama Overview Director Yoo In-sik Network ENA / Net...

  Header illustration for the film review essay of Where’d You Go, Bernadette (2019). Illustration created for editorial movie review purposes. 💭 Short Personal Reflection Where'd You Go, Bernadette (2019) stayed with me long after the credits rolled — not because of its plot, but because of a quiet question it kept asking: what happens to a person when they stop making things? There was a time when creativity felt like something visible — something finished, something the world could recognize. But life has a way of reshaping that belief without asking permission. Through marriage, through caregiving, through the invisible labor of holding a life together, many of us quietly set aside the versions of ourselves we once knew so well. Bernadette's journey to Antarctica is not really about escape. It is about remembering. 🎥 Film Overview Director Richard Linklater Release August 16, 2019 (USA) Runtime 130 minutes Cast Cate Blanchett (Bernadette Fox),...

  Header illustration for the film review essay of Secret (2007). Illustration created for editorial movie review purposes. 💭 Short Personal Reflection Secret (2007) found me somewhere I hadn't expected to be found. To be honest, I was more captivated by the music than the story itself. Perhaps it comes with time — I find it harder to fully surrender to fantasy, at least in live-action films. Reality has a way of anchoring us more firmly than before. With animation, I still find myself believing almost without question. But here, at first, I remained at a certain distance. And then something shifted. When the Piano Battle arrived — Chopin's "Black Key" Etude reimagined under Xianglun's hands — the distance closed without my choosing. Art is never fixed, I thought. It is constantly being reborn through the hands of those who perform it. In that moment, the question of fantasy no longer mattered. The music was real enough to quietly bridge the distance between ...

Header illustration for the film review essay of 5 Centimeters per Second (2007). Illustration created for editorial movie review purposes. 💭 Short Personal Reflection 5 Centimeters per Second (2007) came back to me this April, as I walked through streets lined with cherry blossoms. The film tells us that five centimeters per second is the speed at which a petal falls — and the distance at which two hearts drift apart. But sitting on a small bench beneath the blossoms, holding a cup of coffee, watching the petals fall in silence, I found myself quietly disagreeing. I tend to believe that feelings don't disappear so easily. They remain, like a small ember, quietly staying alive somewhere deep inside. And maybe that is why — even now — the person I miss feels, somehow, still there. 🎥 Film Overview Director Makoto Shinkai Release March 3, 2007 (Japan) Runtime 63 minutes Cast Kenji Mizuhashi (Takaki Tōno), Yoshimi Kondou (Akari Shinohara), Satomi Hanamura (...