Film Reviews by ER

You should know the deal with Cloud Atlas (CA)'s premise, so I won't repeat it.

You should also know, then, how ambitious a task it is to translate CA to the screen. It is one I believe the Wachowskis were overall very successful in undertaking:

GREAT THINGS ABOUT CA

First, the film's ambition and scope is something to praise by itself. CA darts between history, place, genre, mood. All six stories are gripping, and there's a breadth of emotion, a diversity to the cast of characters, and an accomplished effort at building up these six worlds visually that makes for stimulating viewing.

As to how these storylines are tied together, the film tells all six side-by-side, darting rapid-fire between scenes from each. This is in contrast to the novel, in which readers are given stories one half at a time. Some reviewers here feel this "scene-slicing" aspect is confusing. I personally found it an enormous improvement on the book, creating a more vivid sense of the work's themes of connectedness between human lives - scenes link into one another in creative ways, one always ending with a line of dialogue or event that is somehow echoed in the start of the next.

With that, I found the film also improved greatly on the novel by streamlining its stories - the novel is filled with unnecessary fluff and side characters who are largely excised here. Sonmi 451's story was particularly enhanced in the elimination of the novel's irritating twist ending.

Similarly, there are numerous plots which frankly just function better on screen. The Sonmi 451 and Luisa Rey stories for example fall into the action/thriller genres, and benefit from the tension and excitement of action sequences that cannot be accomplished in the meagre 80 pages the novel gives them.

LESS GOOD THINGS

Thematically, the film examines how our lives connect with and depend on one another's, the profound ability we have to shape each other's fates, and the recurrence of forms of oppression and the struggle against them throughout history, from white supremacist anti-black chattel slavery to a future slave class of clones owned by a fast food mega-corporation.

The idea of our lives being interconnected is not the most insightful or original statement. However, it is admittedly a powerful one. It makes for an almost bittersweet observation on the human condition: our interdependencies can be a source of love and hope, or taken advantage of in betrayal or deceit. CA lays bare the complexities and inconsistencies of human nature in a way that leaves me, for one, wondering about our lot.

The film is less successful in its political statements on struggles against oppression. The novel's ambiguous ending is replaced with a somewhat trite, platitudeness, more optimistic statement that just says how "we" can take action and there's hope we might win. Bit generic and feel-good for my tastes.

Similarly, the film can be critiqued on its treatment of race. CA uses yellow-face to allow non-Asian actors to play Korean characters in the neo-Seoul plot, for which it was widely criticised on release. Similarly, the film falls into a white saviour arc in the Adam Ewing plot, Ewing befriending a stowaway slave escapee on his ship and then joining the abolitionist movement. This is sort of answered in the final story, where white settlers on Hawaii are rescued by the all-black "Prescient" saviours, but it's up for debate how successful this "post-racial" film-making approach is.

A final nitpick is that CA, while generally successful in structuring the six stories, has a weak opening. Just seeing the set-up to each story in the first 20 minutes of the film makes for an awkward start.

In all, though, CA is an exciting, intriguing, and thought-provoking work. As someone who found the novel frankly mediocre, I was pleased by its film treatment. If you're a fan of the novel or of the Wachowskis, or if you like a film with a more out-there premise, you should see CA.

WARNING: Moderate spoilers, as well as discussion of rape, predatory behaviour, and violence.

Perfect Blue, Satoshi Kon's widely acclaimed directorial debut to animation, tells the story of Mima Kirigoe, a member (for the initial moments of the film, at least) of CHAM!, a Japanese pop idol trio. When Mima announces to the crowd of a farewell concert that she intends to quit her music career and pursue ambitions of becoming an actress, challenges mount, and it becomes clear that the transition will be more trying than she had initially anticipated. Pressures mount from a controlling fanbase unwilling to accept Mima's departure from pop music, as her former pop idol persona quite literally takes on a life of its own as the hallucinatory being, "The Real Mima", who wages a fight for Mima's identity. This culminates in the brutal murder of numerous individuals involved in Mima's shift to acting, as well as a steady decline in Mima's (and the audience's) ability to tell appearance from reality.

As should be clear from the plot outline, Perfect Blue offers a commentary on celebrity, and the toxic fandom that often corresponds to it. Broadly speaking, the film's story illustrates just how dangerous and terrifying life as a spectacle can be - how life built around a public face and persona is often met with unhealthy fixation from audiences, who refuse to let the objects of their admiration depart from the form they have come to cherish.

Yet there is more to Perfect Blue. The film explores these themes through a very specific examination of Japan's pop idol industry. The film highlights the oppressive expectations and norms under which J-pop idols work - norms that stress idols' purity, innocence, and naivety, and whose function is ultimately to keep the attention of a substantial adult male audience. (Hence why, despite multiple scenes of CHAM! concerts being included throughout Perfect Blue, one would be hard put to identify a single audience member who is both female and below the age of 16.) An image of purity is ultimately what Mima's fans refuse to let her abandon, a primary part of her emotional turmoil, upon performing a rape scene for her breakout TV drama "Double Bind", being humiliation and shame at the fact no one likes "a filthy woman".

Thus, underlying Perfect Blue's critique of the practices of Japan's idol industry is a broader interest in the exploitation of female celebrities for male audiences' voyeuristic pleasure. On this front, Kon and screenwriter Sadayuki Murai are barely any more forgiving of the TV and film industry Mima transfers to. Her rape scene is indicated to have been inserted into Double Bind by a screenwriter seeking to fulfil his own sexual fantasies, and, when the film closes out with Mima seemingly having regained control of her identity and matured out of her pop idol personality, one can't help but feel she's gone out of the frying pan and into the fire.

Overall, then, Perfect Blue is an intriguing work with great thematic depth. Yet a review of this film cannot fail to mention its most immediately striking quality, and that is the sheer mastery with which it is executed on a technical level. Suffice it to say that, two decades on, the animation of Perfect Blue remains utterly astounding, with the disorienting visual techniques used to blur the line between outward appearance and inner reality providing, to this day, a remarkable viewing experience.

If there are any spare criticisms I could throw against Perfect Blue (my score is rounded up from a four-and-a-half rating unavailable on this site), it would be that the complexity of the themes discussed above may merely indicate a lack of focus on the part of Kon and Murai. Disentangling what lessons the film can share was, even for a fan like myself, a difficult process.

All the same, I highly recommend overall that you watch Perfect Blue. And, important piece of advice: do so with *English subtitles*, not the English dub.