The film focuses on Leon, who is a bitter, arrogant, self-obsessed and egotistical writer. Ostensibly, the story is about him realising, or his need to realise, that the world isn't about him. However, the unremarkable cinematography and acting aside, the way that they went around exploring this was very shallow and disappointing. Resorting to making his editor have cancer, or killing off his two friends, and revealing these exclusively while he is on a egotistical monologue or rant, makes the story feel like it was written by someone who still doesn't understand what compassion and letting go of egotism means in real-life terms, and can only process it in terms of these overly dramatic revelations.
"Oh, I was just confronting my love interest for not answering a question I didn't ask, and my editor starts having a heart attack."
"Oh, I was just confronting my love interest for gossiping behind me, turns out she was talking about my editor's cancer which I didn't know about."
"Oh, I was just confessing my love to my love interest, and I am interrupted by the police who brings the news of my friends' death."
"Wow, maybe there are other people in life!"
One shouldn't need disease and death to realise they are not the centre of the world. True compassion is when you can see, understand and practice it in the mundanity of regular life, and it seemed like the film didn't really have a comprehension of that, and it completely fails to explore letting go of self-centredness in any way that would leave the audience with a piece of humanly wisdom. Instead, we're left with an overly-theatrical film that comes across as it was written by a teenager in an English class.
I found it really hilarious that even after all of these dramatic revelations, Leon's first course of action is to turn these events into a novel, which is so ironic in a film about letting go of one's self-obsession.
"Oh, I was just confronting my love interest for not answering a question I didn't ask, and my editor starts having a heart attack."
"Oh, I was just confronting my love interest for gossiping behind me, turns out she was talking about my editor's cancer which I didn't know about."
"Oh, I was just confessing my love to my love interest, and I am interrupted by the police who brings the news of my friends' death."
"Wow, maybe there are other people in life!"
One shouldn't need disease and death to realise they are not the centre of the world. True compassion is when you can see, understand and practice it in the mundanity of regular life, and it seemed like the film didn't really have a comprehension of that, and it completely fails to explore letting go of self-centredness in any way that would leave the audience with a piece of humanly wisdom. Instead, we're left with an overly-theatrical film that comes across as it was written by a teenager in an English class.
I found it really hilarious that even after all of these dramatic revelations, Leon's first course of action is to turn these events into a novel, which is so ironic in a film about letting go of one's self-obsession.