River

Well, I don't know if you know this, but I've been doing an alphabet challenge this year.

I don't know why I did this to myself, but I thought, you know, I'll try something different.

And so each month I'm trying to do, you know, the whole alphabet A to Z.

And obviously January was in the bag.

And yeah, it was fun.

But I've already realized February, you know, there's 29 days in February this year and there's 26 less in the alphabet.

So it's a hell of a lot of film watching.

Yeah,

just take a day off and like watching a TV show, just watch like five films in a day.

Just binge through it all, yeah.

There's some good stuff though, man, that I watched in January.

There was three Third Window films.

Was there? Yeah, so one of them was River that obviously we're going to talk about today.

One of them was One Percenter because you had to check this over to me for your upcoming release.

And the other one, which has been sitting on my shelf for ages and I just haven't bothered with for some reason, was Lee Sang-il's Feeling.

And yeah, I'll tell you what, man, listeners to this podcast will know that I very rarely don't get on with films, but that one I really struggled with.

I really don't think I enjoyed it.

Yeah, it's obviously been a while since you've released it, but do you remember much about that one?

I remember it bombed.

Well, there were a lot of problems around it.

First of all, yeah, I think that movie was a huge hit in Japan.

It even did pretty well at some film festivals, but mainly in Japan it was a huge critical as well as box office success because the book was well-known and the cast were good.

And I remember really, really liking it because I think I'd just been so immersed in Japanese culture cinema at the time i mean i still am now but uh i'm a bit more cynical and um like i forget that for japanese they have a lot of melodrama and also they're long and and maybe i will and that is double it's both long and has a lot of melodrama and i was when i i thought this is going to be a guaranteed success and i bought the writer and they were quite expensive and it was a pain and i released it and like what i didn't expect it was critically bombed in england Right.

Like, a lot of people were really slagging it off, and I thought, oh, fucking hell.

And then when I was reading the reviews, I was like, oh, now that you mention it, it's really melodramatic and all that.