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I watched a couple movies with my friend last week when he visited: both were rewatches for me, but I wanted to share some thoughts anyway.
True Stories (1986, dir. David Byrne)
I watched this movie for the first time last year. February 2020 I watched Stop Making Sense, the Talking Heads concert film, for the first time. I have always enjoyed the music of Talking Heads, but became enamored with them during my sophomore year of college. It was very all-purpose music for me (walking music, music for when I was totally overwhelmed and sobbing, music for when I was dancing with friends, etc etc etc). Suffice it to say that their music really touches my heart in a lot of ways.
David Byrne is the frontman for Talking Heads, and so the story goes that Stop Making Sense was such a major hit that the studio decided to give him the opportunity to direct his own movie (surely another hit would be incoming). He didn't direct another movie after that (LOL).
This is a very atypically plotted movie, more like a series of slice-of-life vignettes all set in the same small town in Texas. It's not a musical per se, but features several diegetic songs that occasionally give the feeling of a musical. The movie has these gorgeous landscapes, luscious costumes, and "interesting" characters (both in writing and casting). It's definitely worth a watch.
This movie also introduced me to Spalding Gray, who was a writer and actor and was known for these one-man (funny but not "comedy") monologues he'd do about his life. He's so unreserved and intriguing in this movie I had to learn more about him. There is a documentary made about his life called And Everything Is Going Fine (2010, dir. Steven Soderbergh), which I watched a few months ago. It was made up of clips from his monologues and archival interviews with him/his friends and family, with no added narration. Even if you don't know anything about Gray, I think this is an entertaining and thoughtful film that is also a reasonable introduction to his body of work.
Paprika (2006, dir. Satoshi Kon)
I think I watched Paprika for the first time before I went to college. I've been in love with Kon's movies since I first saw Millennium Actress my sophomore or junior year of high school. Paprika is the most "experimental" of his movies I think--they all deal with themes of unreality, fluid movement between scenes and sequences, which lends a dream-like quality to them, but this movie is the most "plotless" of them all.
I just learned that the movie is based on a novel by Yasutaka Tsutsui, who also wrote the novel that The Girl Who Leapt Through Time is based off of. I'll have to read those sometime.
I talked a bit with my friend while watching about how similar the movie feels to 2010's Inception. If you've seen both, you know what I mean--they are both about machines that allow you to enter people's dreams, blurring the lines between dreams and reality, infiltrating other people's dreams, etc...there are quite a few similar visuals in both as well, more than seems coincidental. I wouldn't argue that Inception is copied from Paprika, but it's hard to believe that it was imagined up totally without influence from it. The actual bread and butter of each movie is pretty different (and Inception clocks in over a full hour longer LOL), so at any rate I think both are worth watching.
This whole "being similar to another movie" thing is particularly intriguing because of the many similarities between Kon's earlier movie Perfect Blue and the Darren Aronofsky movie Black Swan. I can't speak too much to this because I have never watched Black Swan, but I have heard from reliable sources that the movies are shockingly similar in theme and plot.
I love Chiba and Tokita's relationship in the movie. In a more traditional movie, I would have enjoyed seeing some more cute Chiba/Tokita scenes. As it is, I will enjoy what I got.
Finally, Susumu Hirasawa's score is one of the major highlights of the movie for me. It's a bit chaotic, fast-paced, almost "epic"...I really like it. I wouldn't consider it a traditional score. He uses a Vocaloid for some of the vocal performances, which I have always enjoyed and I think it's worth checking out for that reason alone.
True Stories (1986, dir. David Byrne)
I watched this movie for the first time last year. February 2020 I watched Stop Making Sense, the Talking Heads concert film, for the first time. I have always enjoyed the music of Talking Heads, but became enamored with them during my sophomore year of college. It was very all-purpose music for me (walking music, music for when I was totally overwhelmed and sobbing, music for when I was dancing with friends, etc etc etc). Suffice it to say that their music really touches my heart in a lot of ways.
David Byrne is the frontman for Talking Heads, and so the story goes that Stop Making Sense was such a major hit that the studio decided to give him the opportunity to direct his own movie (surely another hit would be incoming). He didn't direct another movie after that (LOL).
This is a very atypically plotted movie, more like a series of slice-of-life vignettes all set in the same small town in Texas. It's not a musical per se, but features several diegetic songs that occasionally give the feeling of a musical. The movie has these gorgeous landscapes, luscious costumes, and "interesting" characters (both in writing and casting). It's definitely worth a watch.
This movie also introduced me to Spalding Gray, who was a writer and actor and was known for these one-man (funny but not "comedy") monologues he'd do about his life. He's so unreserved and intriguing in this movie I had to learn more about him. There is a documentary made about his life called And Everything Is Going Fine (2010, dir. Steven Soderbergh), which I watched a few months ago. It was made up of clips from his monologues and archival interviews with him/his friends and family, with no added narration. Even if you don't know anything about Gray, I think this is an entertaining and thoughtful film that is also a reasonable introduction to his body of work.
Paprika (2006, dir. Satoshi Kon)
I think I watched Paprika for the first time before I went to college. I've been in love with Kon's movies since I first saw Millennium Actress my sophomore or junior year of high school. Paprika is the most "experimental" of his movies I think--they all deal with themes of unreality, fluid movement between scenes and sequences, which lends a dream-like quality to them, but this movie is the most "plotless" of them all.
I just learned that the movie is based on a novel by Yasutaka Tsutsui, who also wrote the novel that The Girl Who Leapt Through Time is based off of. I'll have to read those sometime.
I talked a bit with my friend while watching about how similar the movie feels to 2010's Inception. If you've seen both, you know what I mean--they are both about machines that allow you to enter people's dreams, blurring the lines between dreams and reality, infiltrating other people's dreams, etc...there are quite a few similar visuals in both as well, more than seems coincidental. I wouldn't argue that Inception is copied from Paprika, but it's hard to believe that it was imagined up totally without influence from it. The actual bread and butter of each movie is pretty different (and Inception clocks in over a full hour longer LOL), so at any rate I think both are worth watching.
This whole "being similar to another movie" thing is particularly intriguing because of the many similarities between Kon's earlier movie Perfect Blue and the Darren Aronofsky movie Black Swan. I can't speak too much to this because I have never watched Black Swan, but I have heard from reliable sources that the movies are shockingly similar in theme and plot.
I love Chiba and Tokita's relationship in the movie. In a more traditional movie, I would have enjoyed seeing some more cute Chiba/Tokita scenes. As it is, I will enjoy what I got.
Finally, Susumu Hirasawa's score is one of the major highlights of the movie for me. It's a bit chaotic, fast-paced, almost "epic"...I really like it. I wouldn't consider it a traditional score. He uses a Vocaloid for some of the vocal performances, which I have always enjoyed and I think it's worth checking out for that reason alone.
