Top 250 Challenge: 244

Ikiru (1952)
Number 230 on IMDb's Top 250

Kanji Watanabe is a longtime bureaucrat in a city office who, along with the rest of the office, spends his entire working life doing nothing. He learns he is dying of cancer and wants to find some meaning in his life. He finds himself unable to talk with his family, and spends a night on the town with a novelist, but that leaves him unfulfilled. He next spends time with a young woman from his office, but finally decides he can make a difference through his job... After Watanabe's death, co-workers at his funeral discuss his behavior over the last several months and debate why he suddenly became assertive in his job to promote a city park, and resolve to be more like Watanabe. Hilarity ensues.

Trivia: The title Ikiru translates to "To Live" in English and was inspired by Leo Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich.

After thirty years working for the government (and never missing a day), Watanabe finds out he has stomach cancer and realizes that in those thirty years, he can remember being busy, but he can't remember ever actually doing anything. Watanabe walks around the whole movie with his head down like is has been beaten to a pulp. He talks really slow and never seems to be able to explain anything (he said "what I meant was.." and "what I mean to say is..." alot without ever finishing his sentences.) This seems to be a way to mirror his life, he never finished anything, until he decides to do something good, and concentrates on pushing a children's park construction plan through the bureaucracy. As soon as he decides to do this we jump five months ahead and arrive at his wake. The last hour is a flashback of how he got the park built (he died in the park) and everybody claiming that he didn't really do anything ("he didn't built it, the Parks Department built it." "He didn't get it approved, the deputy mayor approved it" and so on.) But as they talked they started to realize that he was working in the background getting them to do the things needed to get the park built. They they start wondering if he knew he was going to die because his whole demeanor changed (he only told two people that he had cancer, the novelist, and the young girl). Some say that this is Kurasawa's best work, but I don't think so, Seven Samurai and Ran are pretty good, and Rashoman has become the inspiration of a plot device, but it was still pretty good.

Next Up: Little Miss Sunshine, Everyone just pretend to be normal.