Dolls

Dolls
by Takeshi Kitano

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Category: DVD
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DVD details

Actor: Hidetoshi Nishijima, Ky?ko Fukada, Miho Kanno, Tatsuya Mihashi, Tsutomu Takeshige
Director: Takeshi Kitano
Brand: Uni
Cinematographer: Katsumi Yanagijima
Editor: Takeshi Kitano
Writer: Takeshi Kitano
Producer: Masayuki Mori
Producer: Takio Yoshida
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: Japanese (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Subtitled)
Format: AC-3, Color, Dolby, DVD, NTSC, Subtitled, Widescreen
Picture Format: 1.85:1
Running Time: 114 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2005-03-08
Audience Rating: Unrated
Studio: Palm Pictures / Umvd

DVD Reviews of Dolls

DVD Review: Creative...Different...
Summary: 4 Stars

This is an extremely creative movie; although you have to really pay attention, and take into consideration the metaphor with the old lovers being referred to the dolls.
I do not want to spoil it, but the imagery is absolutey gorgeous!

DVD Review: Tragic lost of the true love
Summary: 5 Stars

This is a very different way to make a movie from T. Kitano. No violent scenes, few or none blood. But is deep and powerful. To me this movie make me to cry for the lost of the most beloved a true love. The three stories are highly dramatic and have a similar beginning and end without a trace of swords, guns, ammo, or blood as mr Kitano usually does.

DVD Review: Painful and beautiful
Summary: 5 Stars

Others have already given a plot synopsis, so I'll avoid that here. Let me simply tell you this: The way the stories are woven together pulls you in, the scenes are absolute eye candy, and the actors and actresses are just phenomenal.

This is a movie that I would list among "Requiem for a Dream" and "House of Sand and Fog" - movies that make your heart ache and mind spin, hardly giving you a moment to catch your breath, and yet somehow also captivating you with a beauty beyond description. As is often the case in life, this film continues to give you hope, then mercilessly takes it away, leaving you desolated in a way that movies rarely do - but at the same time, although haunted, you can't help but love what you've just seen. I actually burst into sobs at the end of this film, and immediately wanted to watch it again.

Brilliant, beautiful, and hurts so good. One I'll watch again and again; recommended to anyone who loves Japanese movies of any genre, movies that actually make you feel, and/or eye candy with substance.

DVD Review: Beautiful Tragedy
Summary: 5 Stars

This is a film that haunts. Fantastic cinematography almost overpower the tales of yearning, betrayal and karma. A beautiful score and excellent performances bring it all together.

DVD Review: Simply Stunning
Summary: 5 Stars

I bought this item and before I watched it I tried to explain the plot to a couple people and failed miserably. I began to worry about whether or not this film would be interesting at all. I am a fan of Takeshi Kitano but I heard in so many places that it was very different from his other work.

It started off a little slow, a lot of shots seemed to linger a bit longer than you feel comfortable with. While some people would see this as boring and pointless, I began to realize that this film had something deeper, more innate to it. Just the way the shots were made brought a certain life to the film, something that can't be achieved by words alone.

The film is not about action, or witty dialogue, however it is a film about emotion. I jest that it has a silent protagonist (Matsumoto) since there are actually so few lines spoken by him. Even though there weren't many lines at all, the film focused on character emotion. This can be seen beautifully in Sawako's plight after the ball toy was crushed. Once again it was a shot that lingered, but each time she tried to use it, you could see the sadness in her face, her constant reminder how everything she loves ends up dying. This theme, though never directly said, was so powerful and it made you really feel the emotions of the character.

This film almost makes you lose all hope, it is a very depressing, real film that most people probably wouldn't appreciate. This is not a fairy tale where everyone lives happily ever after, it brings harsh reality to situations and leaves you with an almost empty feeling at the end.

I can safely say that this film has a lot to offer to those willing to take it in. If nothing else appreciate the beauty of the camera shots taken as this is another amazing point of the film. The scenery is nothing short of astounding throughout the film.
This film needs to be taken in and allowed to swell inside for a good while to really understand it, like I said, approach with an open mind and you will not be disappointed; after all, it is a Takeshi Kitano film, and it doesn't fail to deliver.

Description of Dolls

Inspired by the everlasting emotions expressed in Japanese Bunraku doll theatre, Dolls weaves three stories delicately intertwined by the beauty of sadness. Bound by a long red cord, a young couple wanders in search of something they have tragically forgotten. An aging yakuza mysteriously returns to the park where he used to meet his long-past girlfriend. A disfigured pop star confronts the phenomenal devotion of her biggest fan

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 fianc?e 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

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