Rut #3: Emily Jacobsen: Ping Pong Movie

One of my best friends is serving a mission in Japan right now, so I saw this as an opportunity to observe Japanese culture as a little insight into what he is experiencing. I am also thinking of serving a mission and after seeing this movie I realized how bubbled my life really is, and how much of a culture shock I'm going to go through when I serve! This movie was exciting and I definitely found it more entertaining than I thought I would! It blows my mind how civilizations in history that were as isolated as Japan was created their own cultures that remained pure for so long! The culture has remained so strong that even with global interaction today, it remains unstained, and we still don't get some of the jokes!

My favorite character in this movie was Smile. I grew up doing gymnastics where it is all about the scores and awards you get as an individual, not as a team. I was constantly competing against my best friends on my team, because in the end we were each more worried about our individual scores than our team score. So every meet was a competition against not only against girls from other gyms (like China), but against my best friends (similar to when Smile and Peco played against each other at the end of this movie). Football players and athletes from other team sports rarely have the scenario where they are literally trying to beat their best friend.

I think I will see more foreign films now that the door has been opened! I have been wanting to see "Coco Before Chanel", a foreign French film about how the brand Chanel came to be. I think i'll watch it this weekend!