18 - Paprika (2006)

Back. The annual aniversary occasion seemed like a good moment to try a comeback, although I don't estimate frequent entries for the upcoming months. During this one year break I've watched some movies, not so many as back in the early blog days, but there were some titles good enough for this occasion:

• "Conclave" - probably the best movie as "full package" seen over last year
• "Mickey 17" - very underrated
• "Straume" - just in case somebody thinks a movie can't work without having dialogue in it
• "Bugonia" - the Lanthimos/Stone tandem still works, new episode, sufficiently different from the previous to counter some criticism on increasing monotony in the collaboration
• "La sociedad de la nieve" - hard to watch, but it's worth it
• "The Brutalist" - a bit too long, but it's worth it
• "Anora" - good, but slips towards guilty pleasure
• "Companion" - was expecting a guilty pleasure, but good
• "Alien: Romulus" - surprisingly good, above Fincher and Jeunet's iterations, below Scott and Cameron, practically the best comeback of the series since '86
• "Wallace and Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl" - "The Curse of the Were-Rabbit" of 20 years ago is probably more funny (damn, I'm old), but this gets close to it
• "The Accountant 2" - not as good as the first one, but still sufficiently original to move out from the classic action pattern

and there are others too. However, I picked something older for today's entry, "Paprika", probably not as good as many of the above. However, it's the last I watched, and by a strange multi-layered coincidence it really got to me. Among its layers there's a metaphor of cinema as a "reality escape" equivalent to dreams = got synced well with a blog revival.

The movie is the last anime of the 4 produced by Satoshi Kon during his short time span in this world. I've heard about these, but not being very into the genre I kept ignoring them. Until three days ago, since when I've seen the current one in split pieces. Initially, it didn't catch me enough to see it to the end, but still, finally reaching its end after a second break, I understood why I didn't give up. Let's get a bit into the subject: in a not so far future, DC Mini, a new device invented in a research institute permits connecting to a person's dreams. The action revolves among several characters, mostly the employees of the respective institute, among whom a psychiatrist takes advantage of the device to interact with her patients, via an alter ego: Paprika, and in particular with one patient, a policeman plagued with isomnia and haunted by recurrent dreams. The story gets complicated when the DC Mini prototype gets stolen, and as consequence an increasing number of victims starts popping up, manifesting a strange behavior, where the dream dominates the reality. Further, the action revolves against investigating the theft, but more details would result in spoilers, so let's stop here with the story.

"Paprika" has a literary basis, and it's often referenced as an inspiration source for "Inception". I wouldn't say that is more present there than P.K. Dick's "Ubiq". Indeed, there is a common theme of "dream access", which is central in "Paprika", but we have a different story, with a completely different meaning. A story for which its development convinced me that chaotically nuanced surrealism it's not something specific for Hayao Miyazaki + Studio Ghibli in Japanese animes, because we have plenty of it here too. And that's the minus, which at some point makes the movie slightly entangled and hard to follow, not being clear anymore what happens in reality and what in the dream world. Still, finally we get that meaning I was referring to above.

On the plus side, the movie excels technically, at least for an anime. We have scenes that include volumetric nuances to enhance the perspective, a game of lights, and others, very nicely worked out. The editing helps enhancing the impact. We have a soundtrack which cannot get unnoticed, even just for a track that maintains the impression of a chaotic dream with a bunch of harmonic overlaps, where if we extract just the melodic line on a single track, what results is constrastingly calm (see the keys variant below, even though it's with an active reverb/sustain + a high pitch).

That's what the end of the movie gives you. An impression of getting through a rollercoaster, but leaving enough to you to extract whatever metaphor you want from the dream :) = sufficiently complex to interpret by desire. From a balance between live your life vs. regrets to... but I said, no spoilers ;)

Rating: 4 out of 5 ( for the anniversary occasion, otherwise I would've got stuck to 3.5, too much metaphor can be tiring :) )

PS: And still, spoilers :P press play by choice - although that's probably the most obvious metaphor (pretty much what I wrote above):

Suzume (2022)

It's rare when it happens that I really want to write a blog entry on a movie but I don't have much idea of what I could write about it. I think that in the history of this blog I had like two-three situations when I felt the need to not let a title move by without pointing something out about it, but struggling to do it, and being aware from start that besides saying the movie's good I don't have much else left. Well, maybe there were more similar cases when I wasn't aware it happens :) What's certain for "Suzume" is that we're in such a situation. So...

What we have here is an anime where the background story is some sort of Japanese fantasy, in which a giant worm symbolizing the earthquakes and other natural disasters, escapes from time to time through some doors meant to be closed by somebody called, well, a "closer". The somebody meets during such a journey with Suzume, a teenager on her way to school, who eventually takes over the closer role. And from here on we step into a semi-fantasy road trip, which in my opinion is, as I said already, just a background story. Or a context to build metaphors, and maybe surprisingly, a very.. abstract one.

Let's move quickly over the technical part where, for an anime, the visual experience definitely deserves a viewing. I'm actually sorry I missed this on big screen. Now, we're getting to the part where I don't really know what else to say. As in other more "classic" anime movies, where obviously Miyazaki comes to mind, there are parts far enough from reality to be hard to get their meaning and even slowing down the movie. Still, these are also part of the metaphores set, and I believe each of these can be understood differently depending on who's watching it, which is probably the most interesting thing in the entire movie build-up - somebody could relate something with his or hers own life in a very different way than somebody else will probably do it. It might sound cryptic what I'm saying, but it's more practical to experiment on your own and see if it checks. Maybe I'm wrong :)

Rating: 4 out of 5

Afro Samurai (2007) and his Resurrection (2009)

As probably noticeable I still lack the time for new material so I decided to stop at something that I don't remember when or if I had on my blog = an anime. The difference to the usual anime range is that "Afro Samurai" is not an exclusive Japanese production, all the acting and most of the sound design being made in Hollywood. Probably that's why 10 years ago this mini-series had quite some success, having Samuel L. Jackson as lead on the poster. All the action is centered around a pretty straight-forward revenge story. The context is where the original part comes from: Somewhere in a dystopian future, there are two samurai head-bands - No. 1 and No. 2. The toughest samurai holds the number 1 + something like a "god status" = untouchable = he cannot be challenged by anybody else except number 2. Number 2, however, can be challenged by anybody who would like to become number 2, meaning that his life is mostly about fight, more fight and even more fight until he manages to get to number 1, if he lasts that long (because obviously neither number 1 nor number 2 are really the persons to find in a phone book). Well... the story starts with losing the No. 1 head-band along his own head by the father of the main character. The little Afro wants revenge, and from here a series of flashbacks tell us where he did grow up, where he learned to wield a katana, how he got the number 2 head-band and how many dead bodies he left behind in the process. All these come packed with lots & lots & lots of blood... (too much actually...). Anyway, as I said, the context plus some very original built characters (I didn't mention much about an imaginary alter-ego of Afro who's as talkative as silent the main character is) made "Afro Samurai" a decent anime, which is at least interesting. About his resurrection...

In a typical Hollywood fashion, considering the success the first part in the series had, two years after another anime was released basically repeating the whole story. Meaning that (spoiler alert) Afro also loses the No. 1 head-band (but keeps his head), that being taken by a person showing up from nowhere. The sister of one of his former victims, comes up with a diabolical revenge plan = cloning Afro senior as a sort of mindless cyborg and placing Afro junior in the place of killing his own father to get the number 1 head-band and to put him finally to rest. The bad part in all this story is that's a sort of reheated soup, which starts to get boring immediately after another series of endless fights starts... Either that, or I got old and I don't have the patience I had a while ago (I've watched this relatively recent). Therefore...

Rating: AS - 3 out of 5 ; ASR - 2 out of 5