Movie Club

Hay una película japonesa que me dejó pensando durante días. Se llama Rental Family, y su premisa es simple pero perturbadora: en Japón existe un servicio donde puedes contratar actores para que hagan el papel de tu familia. Un padre para tu hija. Un prometido para tus padres. Un abuelo en un funeral.

Lo primero que uno siente es una especie de sopresa, e incredulidad. Lo segundo, si se queda con esa incomodidad el tiempo suficiente, es reconocimiento.

Todo ser humano llega al mundo con necesidades que van mucho más allá del alimento y el abrigo. Necesitamos ser vistos. Necesitamos ser nombrados por alguien que nos conozca de verdad. Necesitamos pertenecer a algo que nos sostenga, que nos reciba, que esté cuando llegamos a casa. Esas no son necesidades caprichosas ni culturales — son constitutivas de lo que somos. Sin ellas, algo en nosotros se detiene.

Lo que la película…

During the last years of my father’s life, I would travel to Madrid to visit him. Each night after dinner, we had a ritual: we’d watch a movie together. He had this little notepad, where he would carefully jot down the date, the name of the film, the director, and the main actors. There was something deeply ceremonial about it—his love for cinema, his sharp intellect, and his reverence for the art form turned every evening into something so special with such connection.

By the end of his life, those notebooks held over 350 titles. He was, without a doubt, the most brilliant and intellectual man I’ve ever known, with a photographic memory and a unique appreciation for art in all its forms. By his own account a frustrated painter himself. 

The night we watched Pollock is etched in my heart. My brother Tony—a well-known artist himself—joined us, and the three…

These forum posts aren’t meant to be reviews or critiques—I’m not here to analyze every frame or debate the acting choices.

What I care about most is how a film makes me feel, what it stirs inside, and what I walk away with. Maestro (2023), directed by and starring Bradley Cooper, did just that—it stayed with me in quiet, surprising ways.

There’s been a lot of mixed talk around this film, from its storyline to performances. But I was drawn to it immediately because I’m always fascinated by biopics of artists. They’re usually rich with complexity, and Maestro is no exception.

What spoke to me most was the contrast in Leonard Bernstein’s life between the solitude of the composer and the public persona of the conductor. That beautiful tension between turning inward to create and turning outward to perform—it’s something so many artists wrestle with. The film touches on this duality gently but…