Most Helpful Customer Reviews
|
|
37 of 38 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
not quite what you'd expect...., 27 Sep 2003
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.
|
|
|
13 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
AWESOME!!!, 23 Nov 2003
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.
|
|
|
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
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
|
|
|
Most Recent Customer Reviews
|
![Dolls [DVD] [2003] [Region 1] [US Import] [NTSC]](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/518NXQY9J9L._SL75_SS50_.jpg)
![Kikujiro [DVD] [1999]](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41J9RS3DA6L._SL75_SS50_.jpg)
![Nobody Knows [2004] [DVD]](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41Q4FWMP13L._SL75_SS50_.jpg)
![Gohatto [DVD] [2001]](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41Z70M5T9EL._SL75_SS50_.jpg)
![Gohatto [DVD] [2001]](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41Z70M5T9EL._SL500_SS90_.jpg)
![Kikujiro [DVD] [1999]](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41J9RS3DA6L._SL500_SS90_.jpg)
![Nobody Knows [2004] [DVD]](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41Q4FWMP13L._SL500_SS90_.jpg)
![Last Life In The Universe [2003] [DVD]](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51V8SA9RZTL._SL500_SS90_.jpg)
![Kids Return [DVD] [1996]](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51c%2Bqof7YKL._SL500_SS90_.jpg)
