I feel like I’ve been watching more movies than I ever have as of recently, like when I wasn’t studying in the city it felt like a bit of a stretch to venture out to Nova on my days off, but now that I go to RMIT even though I’m not at uni it feels fine? Maybe because I’m making the trek to the city on more of a regular basis it feels fine to do as much? 

Anyway on Monday we went to Nova with the goal in mind of seeing Toni Erdmann, but because it was in the tiny cinema it had already sold out, but my buddies and I had a one track mind for at least watching a film, so we looked at the options, and A Man Called Ove was what we decided on. Swedish, darkish comedy? Another foreign language film dark comedy? Why not.

It was really good in any sense, but it was about a curmudgeon who had just lost his wife and a recurring thing in the film was that he was trying to end his life, and each sense in which he attempts to do so he is distracted by the goings of the world around him. It was a pretty interesting well rounded movie though and I felt like it covered all the bases you would kind of want, like to get a back story into why he became like this, and it was sweet.

It was interesting because this week headspace made that press release concerning the new Netflix original show 13 Reasons Why, and that was intriguing because I’d seen it pop up, I read what it was about, and maybe watched approximately 13 minutes before I stopped, for the same underlying reasons that Headspace feels it was so problematic. Which I guess seems weird cos I’ve just talked about how much I liked A Man Called Ove, but my reasoning here is that in a way Ove’s attempts exist, but he always seems to want to deal with what is still happening, and the resolution of the film itself ends on a relatively lighter note considering the basis of the film. Definitely preferable to 13 Reasons Why, wherein we’re supposed to just follow these 13 episodes detailing a side of a prerecorded tape that places the blame on a particular person in Rachel’s life that she feels is responsible for her decision to end her life, and I feel like it just opens a really unnecessary can of worms for the viewers, to consider whether they were to blame, and potentially garner those thoughts themselves.

That said I think it’s really important that it’s kind of directly through the existence of the show that theres a relatively high brow level of discussion regarding suicide, in that through the shows kind of missing the mark, important relevant parties have felt it necessary to mark these press releases. I just hope it’s enough to outweigh the pretty detrimental nature of the show itself though.