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Dolls [DVD] [2003]
 
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Dolls [DVD] [2003]

DVD ~ Miho Kanno
4.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
RRP: £19.99
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Frequently Bought Together

Dolls [DVD] [2003] + Kikujiro [DVD] [1999] + Gohatto [DVD] [2001]
Total RRP: £55.97
Price For All Three: £23.03

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What Do Customers Ultimately Buy After Viewing This Item?

Dolls [DVD] [2003]
71% buy the item featured on this page:
Dolls [DVD] [2003] 4.7 out of 5 stars (6)
£11.68
Kikujiro [DVD] [1999]
13% buy
Kikujiro [DVD] [1999] 4.3 out of 5 stars (9)
£6.37
Gohatto [DVD] [2001]
9% buy
Gohatto [DVD] [2001] 3.8 out of 5 stars (11)
£4.98
All About Lily Chou-Chou [DVD] [2002]
4% buy
All About Lily Chou-Chou [DVD] [2002] 4.4 out of 5 stars (10)
£6.98
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Product details

  • Actors: Miho Kanno, Hidetoshi Nishijima, Tatsuya Mihashi, Kyôko Fukada, Tsutomu Takeshige
  • Directors: Takeshi Kitano
  • Writers: Takeshi Kitano
  • Producers: Masayuki Mori, Takio Yoshida
  • Format: PAL, Widescreen
  • Language Japanese
  • Subtitles: English
  • Region: Region 2 (This DVD may not be viewable outside Europe. Read more about DVD formats.)
  • Number of discs: 1
  • Classification: 12
  • Studio: Artificial Eye
  • DVD Release Date: 24 Nov 2003
  • Run Time: 113 minutes
  • Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
  • ASIN: B0000C665I
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 24,987 in DVD (See Bestsellers in DVD)

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Reviews

Amazon.co.uk Review
Dolls is a film of extraordinary beauty and tenderness from a filmmaker chiefly associated with grave mayhem and deadpan humor. That is to say, this is not one more Takeshi Kitano movie focused on stoical cops or gangsters. The title refers most directly, but not exclusively, to the theatrical tradition of Bunraku, enacted by half-life-size dolls and their visible but shrouded onstage manipulators. Such a performance--a drama of doomed lovers--occupies the first five minutes of the film, striking a keynote that resonates as flesh-and-blood characters take up the action.

The film-proper is dominated by the all-but-wordless odyssey of a susceptible yuppie and the jilted fiancée driven mad by his desertion to marry the boss's daughter. Bound by a blood-red cord, they move hypnotically through a landscape variously urban and natural, stylized only by the breathtaking purity of light, angle, color, and formal movement imposed by Kitano's compositional eye and rigorous, fragmentary editing. Along the way we also pick up the story of an elderly gangster, haunted by memories of the lover he deserted three decades earlier and generations of "brothers" for whose deaths he was, in the accepted order of things, responsible. Another strand is added to the imagistic weave via a doll-like pop singer and a groupie blinded by devotion to her.

This is a film in which character, morality, metaphysics, and destiny are all expressed through visual rhyme and startling adjustments of perspective. It sounds abstract--and it is--but it's also heartbreaking and thrilling to behold. Kitano isn't in it, but as an artist he's all over it. His finest film, and for all its exoticism, his most accessible. --Richard T. Jameson

DVD Description
Cult director Takeshi Kitano weaves together three visually stunning and deeply touching stories of undying love inspired by traditional Japanese Bunraku puppet theatre. The first story concerns a rising young executive who turned his back on his girlfriend in pursuit of his career. Following a failed suicide attempt, which leaves her in a mindless daze, he runs to his former love’s side and now they roam the country together, bound by a red cord, in search of something they have lost. The second is about an ageing yazuka who also abandoned his girlfriend for the sake of success. 30 years later, he is compelled to return to the park where they used to meet. The final tale is of a former pop star who becomes a recluse following a disfiguring accident. One day, one of her greatest fans comes to prove the extent of his devotion to her …

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Customer Reviews

6 Reviews
5 star:
 (5)
4 star:    (0)
3 star:
 (1)
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1 star:    (0)
 
 
 
 
 
Average Customer Review
4.7 out of 5 stars (6 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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35 of 36 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars not quite what you'd expect...., 27 Sep 2003
By andi hessen (newport, gwent United Kingdom) - See all my reviews
Written and directed by, but not starring the multi talented, hardest working person in show-biz, Takeshi Kitano, Dolls is a film that will surprise anyone with preconceptions. Book-ended by a Japanese puppet theatre show, telling a tragic love story, the film tells three stories in Kitano Takeshi's almost trade-mark style, but with subtle differences. There is violence, but the viewer only sees the results. There is an almost Sakamoto-esque soundtrack. The main story centres on a couple roped together as they walk through the four seasons and beautifully shot surroundings ( an abundance of blossoms, autumnal maple leaves and crisp snow). Two other stories cross at tangents; a Yakuza clan boss who left his girlfriend years before, only to find she had kept her promise to him, and a disturbingly avid fan of a pop star, who goes to extraordinary lengths to meet the star after she retires from public life after an accident. There are many images to help tell the stories, but there is no superfluous dialogue to get in the way or distract the viewer from the smallest details to the stunning landscapes that are more than mere backdrops. All tell of how devoted love can make a person. All tell how futile the same love can become.
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12 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars AWESOME!!!, 23 Nov 2003
By S. Law "runaway" (glasgow) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
I was lucky enough to see this film on big screen but viewing it on a smaller screen doesn't take away the original beauty of this film! it is TOTALLY awe inspiring, a film i hope you all have the chance to see.
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12 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Puppets are as big as life and humans are as small as death, 15 Jan 2005
By Jacques COULARDEAU "A soul doctor, so to say" (OLLIERGUES France) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   
This Japanese film is probably the most disturbing and disquieting film I have seen in many months or even years, and yet also one of the most Japanese films I have ever admired and enjoyed, that naturally came from Japan. The rhythm say some is slow. In fact it is real. Long shots, long sequences of people in real time, in the time of real reality. Nothing virtual about it. Then pictures, landscapes, urbanscapes, moutainscapes that are breathtaking by their beauty, for sure, but also their density and symbolic value. From one sequence to the next, from one scene to the next, symbolical elements are entertwined with the utmost art and delicacy, fineness and minuteness. These symbolical elements that run through the film are extremely difficult to capture, and yet the eye picks them, recognizes them and it is quite a pleasure to shift from one situation to the next without a complete break, with a constant reference from one to the others. The integration of Bunraku « puppets » is a marvellous idea and effect. The puppets become alive into the characters and the characters become dead into the puppets that are alive in spite of the inertia that is theirs, an inertia that can only be moved by three manipulators per puppet, one actor and one musician. That is a lot of people behind the china and cloth actors. And that is not all. The film reveals the deep layers of universal consciousness in front of love, death and life. Love cannot be escaped and if you try to do so, you will have to pay. Death cannot be imposed onto any one, and if one tries to do so on his neighbour, sooner or later, he will meet with this death in his own life. Life cannot be transformed into a game, because it is not a game. If you try to become the slave of such a game, of such a fancy, of such a mania, you will have to face life in the eyes and death will ensue. And the film closes, or nearly on the final image of the main metaphor : love, when betrayed, becomes an enslavement, a mendicant's fate, a couple of lost souls forever tied up and led on the road to the past to their truth, to falling into some an abyss, and dying not in one another's arms but dangling like two mangled pieces of game side to side in midair. And the hunter is that great leveller of our world, that great justice-maker of our world, that life-love-death, the triple goddess of so many mythologies, the trinity of so many religions, the triad of so many imaginations, that looms in the sky of our vanity immense, eternal and unfathomable.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

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Most Recent Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars One of the most beautiful works ever committed to film
Takeshi Kitano may be everywhere in Japanese media but unlike the omnipresence of Western celebrities, Kitano is an artist and the Japanese recognise this. Read more
Published 3 months ago by Mr. D. J. ODRISCOLL

5.0 out of 5 stars Touching
I loved this movie! Everything about it from the acting (or lack of in that the actors act like marionettes and therefore with very little facial expression) It's beautiful with... Read more
Published on 5 April 2006

3.0 out of 5 stars "Poetic"? You Betcha!
I'd love to join the Amazon reviewers awarding this peculiar film five stars, but to be honest this art-house product isn't going to please all film fans: even those few in the... Read more
Published on 26 Oct 2005 by Sordel

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