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Millennium Actress (Sub) Status: COMPLETE
Movie
Knowing only the barest description of the plot of Millennium Actress going in, my immediate thought was a Satoshi Kon version of Titanic.
An older woman retells her romantic story as a youth, but this time it's as an actress and we have a biography-style portrait of her life remixed together with the reality-bending you'd expect from Satoshi Kon.
I was correct in expecting the interview to engage the interviewers in a way so as to portray her story as so vivid that they can see themselves in it, that's exactly what happens, but the rest of my hopeful expectations of the movie were sadly disappointed.
The entire romance the story centers around is that of the actress, Chiyoko, when she's very young and still under the thumb of her repressive parents when she bumps into a bloody stranger and aids his escape from the police without knowing a single thing about him other than the facts that he apologizes to people he runs into and he's concealing something.
INSTANT FLASHBACK to Dirty Pair: Flash's first episode and the whole reason I opted not to watch past that: STUPID CHARACTERS.
We don't know what side of the war he's on, we don't know what he's done to incur the ongoing wrath of the police, but he's a painter so let's just hide him in our house, right?
The guy says to thank her, he'll invite her to Manchuria after the war is over and he gives her a key. We don't know what the key goes to, all he says is it's important, but he manages to go many years without it so it stands to reason he doesn't need it.
This single unhelpful key apparently exists purely for Chiyoko to orient her ENTIRE life around. She wants to find him to return it.
She just stumbles into acting as a means of traveling to Manchuria, but beyond that point we're never given any explanation of why she ever continued acting. She never expresses any favorability towards it, once she gets to Manchuria her use for it is over, and her closest co-workers turn out to be pretty scummy people, so why?
The whole "acting" part of the movie feels like an excuse to serve scenes in different settings so you can draw parallels from her movies to her real world search, but all of this stretches plausibility in a lot of different ways.
Movie
Knowing only the barest description of the plot of Millennium Actress going in, my immediate thought was a Satoshi Kon version of Titanic.
An older woman retells her romantic story as a youth, but this time it's as an actress and we have a biography-style portrait of her life remixed together with the reality-bending you'd expect from Satoshi Kon.
I was correct in expecting the interview to engage the interviewers in a way so as to portray her story as so vivid that they can see themselves in it, that's exactly what happens, but the rest of my hopeful expectations of the movie were sadly disappointed.
The entire romance the story centers around is that of the actress, Chiyoko, when she's very young and still under the thumb of her repressive parents when she bumps into a bloody stranger and aids his escape from the police without knowing a single thing about him other than the facts that he apologizes to people he runs into and he's concealing something.
INSTANT FLASHBACK to Dirty Pair: Flash's first episode and the whole reason I opted not to watch past that: STUPID CHARACTERS.
We don't know what side of the war he's on, we don't know what he's done to incur the ongoing wrath of the police, but he's a painter so let's just hide him in our house, right?
The guy says to thank her, he'll invite her to Manchuria after the war is over and he gives her a key. We don't know what the key goes to, all he says is it's important, but he manages to go many years without it so it stands to reason he doesn't need it.
This single unhelpful key apparently exists purely for Chiyoko to orient her ENTIRE life around. She wants to find him to return it.
She just stumbles into acting as a means of traveling to Manchuria, but beyond that point we're never given any explanation of why she ever continued acting. She never expresses any favorability towards it, once she gets to Manchuria her use for it is over, and her closest co-workers turn out to be pretty scummy people, so why?
The whole "acting" part of the movie feels like an excuse to serve scenes in different settings so you can draw parallels from her movies to her real world search, but all of this stretches plausibility in a lot of different ways.
Evidently she's typecast as the female romantic lead so you can pump that for all it's worth, but there's more than one occasion where she actually runs into the guy again only for him to fall just out of reach.
For cheesy cliche dramatic purposes in the movies she's in, it works, but are these scenes really supposed to serve a parallel to a real world situation where she actually sees the guy and they're somehow not able to stop and have a conversation? That's AWFULLY CONVENIENT.
Not to mention we never actually see the real world equivalent of these scenes, they're told purely through the movies she's acting in, so the unrealistic movie cliches are being exercised in the most literal way.
It happens that way because it's more dramatic if it happens that way.
It's the same excuse you could use for most of the plot contrivances throughout the story:
She falls in love at first sight because movie.
She needs a macguffin to find him because movie.
She finds him despite not knowing who he is or even what he looks like, but he ends disappearing again anyway because movie.
I really don't like this sort of love story. I can't relate to the love interest because he's literally designed to be an enigma and I can't relate to the main character because they're shallow and as stubborn as a brick wall. It was ONE GESTURE, why do you feel the need to bend over backwards and practically sacrifice your life in the name of this ONE GESTURE?
For cheesy cliche dramatic purposes in the movies she's in, it works, but are these scenes really supposed to serve a parallel to a real world situation where she actually sees the guy and they're somehow not able to stop and have a conversation? That's AWFULLY CONVENIENT.
Not to mention we never actually see the real world equivalent of these scenes, they're told purely through the movies she's acting in, so the unrealistic movie cliches are being exercised in the most literal way.
It happens that way because it's more dramatic if it happens that way.
It's the same excuse you could use for most of the plot contrivances throughout the story:
She falls in love at first sight because movie.
She needs a macguffin to find him because movie.
She finds him despite not knowing who he is or even what he looks like, but he ends disappearing again anyway because movie.
I really don't like this sort of love story. I can't relate to the love interest because he's literally designed to be an enigma and I can't relate to the main character because they're shallow and as stubborn as a brick wall. It was ONE GESTURE, why do you feel the need to bend over backwards and practically sacrifice your life in the name of this ONE GESTURE?
You know, since the WHOLE MOVIE'S oriented around trying to attain this ONE GOAL, I MIGHT be able to get into it, just to see the main character struggle and succeed at what they're working at, right?
Well... I can't. The movie doesn't make the journey very enjoyable and the constant failure and understanding that the main character has just flushed so much of their life away chasing this total mystery is just depressing.
Potentially the best scene in the movie for me is when the war veteran arrives to deliver a letter from him to her. Before he can tell her CRUCIAL PLOT INFORMATION though, she runs away to go looking for him!
There's NO CHANCE to just let anything settle in and emotionally register with her, it's just "I'm dead inside, I've don't have any other ambitions or goals other than to find this guy. I'm leaving now... to go find this guy.".
Lines like "I love him more everyday" don't help matters either, they just reinforce the idea that this woman is delusional.
The end of the movie does it's best to emphasize that it's not the end goal to her that's important, but the chase itself.
I would be TOTALLY ONBOARD WITH THAT if I felt like the movie reinforced that idea to me AT ALL. She didn't look like she was having fun, she looked miserable, she felt disconnected from everything, and I hazard to imagine that it had any sort of positive impact on her acting.
If it's the "chase" or "ride" I should've been into, I can guarantee you I would have been significantly more invested in it if this wasn't also the least creative Satoshi Kon work I've seen.
I understand Perfect Blue was the only thing he'd directed prior to this, but even Perfect Blue at it's best played with the conceptual range of reality far more competently than the best in Millennium Actress. I think the premise of the interviewers being taken on a vivid storytelling tour of an actress's film career has HUGE untapped potential for cool edits, transitions, and reversals, but I feel like the bare minimum of Satoshi's crazy imagination was used here and the story suffers from the get-go because of the Overnight Romance.
Despite it being an Overnight Romance, I can't really hate on it that much because it's so focused in it's intent and there's nothing wrong with it's intent, but I can't really say I enjoyed the movie either.
It's just one of those where I was waiting for the appeal to click with me up until the credit roll and afterwards I just felt kinda empty and depressed. I liked Titanic a lot more.
Final Verdict: [Friggen' Awesome][Pretty Good][Meh...][Just... Bad][Irredeemably Awful]
Well... I can't. The movie doesn't make the journey very enjoyable and the constant failure and understanding that the main character has just flushed so much of their life away chasing this total mystery is just depressing.
Potentially the best scene in the movie for me is when the war veteran arrives to deliver a letter from him to her. Before he can tell her CRUCIAL PLOT INFORMATION though, she runs away to go looking for him!
There's NO CHANCE to just let anything settle in and emotionally register with her, it's just "I'm dead inside, I've don't have any other ambitions or goals other than to find this guy. I'm leaving now... to go find this guy.".
Lines like "I love him more everyday" don't help matters either, they just reinforce the idea that this woman is delusional.
The end of the movie does it's best to emphasize that it's not the end goal to her that's important, but the chase itself.
I would be TOTALLY ONBOARD WITH THAT if I felt like the movie reinforced that idea to me AT ALL. She didn't look like she was having fun, she looked miserable, she felt disconnected from everything, and I hazard to imagine that it had any sort of positive impact on her acting.
If it's the "chase" or "ride" I should've been into, I can guarantee you I would have been significantly more invested in it if this wasn't also the least creative Satoshi Kon work I've seen.
I understand Perfect Blue was the only thing he'd directed prior to this, but even Perfect Blue at it's best played with the conceptual range of reality far more competently than the best in Millennium Actress. I think the premise of the interviewers being taken on a vivid storytelling tour of an actress's film career has HUGE untapped potential for cool edits, transitions, and reversals, but I feel like the bare minimum of Satoshi's crazy imagination was used here and the story suffers from the get-go because of the Overnight Romance.
Despite it being an Overnight Romance, I can't really hate on it that much because it's so focused in it's intent and there's nothing wrong with it's intent, but I can't really say I enjoyed the movie either.
It's just one of those where I was waiting for the appeal to click with me up until the credit roll and afterwards I just felt kinda empty and depressed. I liked Titanic a lot more.
Final Verdict: [Friggen' Awesome][Pretty Good][Meh...][Just... Bad][Irredeemably Awful]