Final review: Millenium Actress
Jun. 10th, 2005 06:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
timepiececlockWell, I finished the movie.
How sad. And yet-- not sad.
The sad OMG the sad
That she never got to know him for real.
That she spent years loving and chasing a ghost.
That she never knew.
That she did know, in a way (the painting!), but that she couldn't let go of the dream.
That she never found another real love.
That she died, in the end.
That she was the one who cursed herself with the quest of neverending love. That she was the old wraith woman.
The happy or at least the not-entirely sad
That she lived a long, full life.
That she kept him in her heart always.
That she had a great love and that great love led her toward a full life.
That when she died, she died holding the key to the most important thing in the world-- him.
That it's all okay, because in the end it was the chase she loved the most, and knowing him gave her a lifetime of that.
The pretty
Well, this film is fucking AMAZING when it comes to the pretty. This is probably in my top 5 choices of "beautiful animation." I don't know what the other 4 are because I've never really made a list before, but this one has to be way up there.
The art design! The settings! The costumes! The fluidity and clarity of motion! The color! The transitions! The framing! The fucking mise en scene! And you know a movie has to be good if it makes me actually recall vocabulary from the one film class I took.
The writing
The head-trip! The symbolism! The pacing! The recurring characters interwoven between the real and unreal! The meta! The crazy WTF enthralling gorgeousness of it all put together!
The overall
I find it hard to find anything I dislike about this movie. I can't imagine finding someone over the age of say 15 who wouldn't find something to like/appreciate/love in this movie. I mean, what's not to love?
I guess if your mind is so one-dimension you absolutely must have one-dimensional A-B-C storytelling then you wouldn't like this movie... but actually I didn't find it as confusing as I expected from reading people's reviews. While it jumps around a lot, it's not as hard to understand as FLCL (which was so hidden in the randomness, whereas nothing in this film is random), and it's not inverted backward like movie Memento was.
The storyline is actually very linear. It just...swivels. And the line it swivels around is the line between what is real and what is imagined.
Nevertheless, despite the...swivelyness of the story's path, the characters kept you grounded and I never felt lost. In constrast, I felt caught up in it.
In certain ways that it mixed the real and unreal of a biographical story it reminded me of Big Fish, though I hate to make that comparison because a) this is a better movie than Big Fish was, and b) they're about very different things and are executed very differently, and... hell. I don't know why I'm comparing them. It's just the way that you're not sure how much of what you see is real or not, and the fact that in the end, the thin line between doesn't even matter.
Gah. I need... icons. And... the OST. I need to find the OST for this movie. And then I need to get money so I can go out and buy the DVD.
I wish I had gone to see this in the theater when it was released here. This would have been a good film to see on a big screen.
How sad. And yet-- not sad.
The sad OMG the sad
That she never got to know him for real.
That she spent years loving and chasing a ghost.
That she never knew.
That she did know, in a way (the painting!), but that she couldn't let go of the dream.
That she never found another real love.
That she died, in the end.
That she was the one who cursed herself with the quest of neverending love. That she was the old wraith woman.
The happy or at least the not-entirely sad
That she lived a long, full life.
That she kept him in her heart always.
That she had a great love and that great love led her toward a full life.
That when she died, she died holding the key to the most important thing in the world-- him.
That it's all okay, because in the end it was the chase she loved the most, and knowing him gave her a lifetime of that.
The pretty
Well, this film is fucking AMAZING when it comes to the pretty. This is probably in my top 5 choices of "beautiful animation." I don't know what the other 4 are because I've never really made a list before, but this one has to be way up there.
The art design! The settings! The costumes! The fluidity and clarity of motion! The color! The transitions! The framing! The fucking mise en scene! And you know a movie has to be good if it makes me actually recall vocabulary from the one film class I took.
The writing
The head-trip! The symbolism! The pacing! The recurring characters interwoven between the real and unreal! The meta! The crazy WTF enthralling gorgeousness of it all put together!
The overall
I find it hard to find anything I dislike about this movie. I can't imagine finding someone over the age of say 15 who wouldn't find something to like/appreciate/love in this movie. I mean, what's not to love?
I guess if your mind is so one-dimension you absolutely must have one-dimensional A-B-C storytelling then you wouldn't like this movie... but actually I didn't find it as confusing as I expected from reading people's reviews. While it jumps around a lot, it's not as hard to understand as FLCL (which was so hidden in the randomness, whereas nothing in this film is random), and it's not inverted backward like movie Memento was.
The storyline is actually very linear. It just...swivels. And the line it swivels around is the line between what is real and what is imagined.
Nevertheless, despite the...swivelyness of the story's path, the characters kept you grounded and I never felt lost. In constrast, I felt caught up in it.
In certain ways that it mixed the real and unreal of a biographical story it reminded me of Big Fish, though I hate to make that comparison because a) this is a better movie than Big Fish was, and b) they're about very different things and are executed very differently, and... hell. I don't know why I'm comparing them. It's just the way that you're not sure how much of what you see is real or not, and the fact that in the end, the thin line between doesn't even matter.
Gah. I need... icons. And... the OST. I need to find the OST for this movie. And then I need to get money so I can go out and buy the DVD.
I wish I had gone to see this in the theater when it was released here. This would have been a good film to see on a big screen.
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no subject
Date: 2005-06-30 07:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-07-01 03:03 am (UTC)But, I'm not sure that it was sad that she never found him. If she'd found him, he could never live up to the expectations she'd built up for him, you know? He would turn out to be an ordinary man.
I sort of thought that she was in love with love more than she was in love with a man. She had an extraordinary fantasy built up in her mind about this mysterious rebel, this fighter, this artist, this impossibly romantic figure. Her life on screen was just fantasy - Just like the image she'd built up of him in her chase. That's what I thought it was all about.
When she finally reached the painting and the figure walked away from her without showing her his face, I think that's when she realized that she didn't want a real person. She wanted a representation of a person. I think she was sad for a bit, but she seemed shrewd to me during the interview. She had a flair for the dramatic. She came in and went out with a huge bang. Her life was spent chasing a ghost.
Somewhere in there is the message that we are all just human in the end.
It really was an amazing movie, wasn't it? *sigh*
Have you seen Tokyo Godfathers?
no subject
Date: 2005-07-01 08:14 pm (UTC)