Hacker Cinema
Millennium Actress
千年女優
2002 · Film · 87 min
Directed by Satoshi Kon
Documentary filmmaker Genya Tachibana has tracked down the legendary actress Chiyoko Fujiwara, who mysteriously vanished at the height of her career. When he presents her with a key she had lost and thought was gone forever, the filmmaker could not have imagined that it would not only unlock the long-held secrets of Chiyoko’s life... but also his own.
4 positive2 neutralfrom 6 commenters
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7 comments on Hacker News
Satoshi Kon’s Millennium Actress is one of the best movies I have ever seen.
Personally, I found 'Perfect Blue' to be a remarkably unpleasant movie... really well done, but ugh.
If you haven't seen it, I recommend seeing 'Millennium Actress' and/or 'Paprika' first, and then if you love the style, watch 'Perfect Blue'.
'Tokyo Godfathers' (which is not at all what you'd expect from the title... it's about three homeless men who find a baby) is also very good too.
Aside Chiaki Konaka from Lain, I would recommend some of the works of Sadayuki Murai (who, coincidentally, co-worked with Konaka in Bubblegum Crisis 2040):
- Moryo no Hako (not sure what's the English name, but it's a nice horror/detective story from a novel)
- Millennium Actress (an IMO nice way to show the evolution of the Japanese cinema)
- Perfect Blue (mostly Satoshi Kon's work, but Murai worked in the screenplay)
There's also Boogiepop Phantom, but you lose a bit of the plot if you haven't read the original novels.
Not sure if "iconic", but I recommend Millennium Actress for an interesting way to weave a story which goes through the evolution of the Japanese film industry.
The screenplay was written by Sadayuki Murai, who put a unique touch on whatever he worked in (he also worked with Satoshi Kon in Perfect Blue).
Also not a film, but I found "Mōryō no Hako" (a short series adapted from a 1995 book) worth watching: at the heart it's basically a crime story, but the execution, with some "hallucinated" scenes, and also the characters are interesting.
I always appreciate that Hulu has its Criterion collection section.
And I very recently signed up for Seeso for $4 a month because I was craving some Monty Python's Flying Circus. I don't plan on keeping it long term, maybe just a month, to get it out of my system.
And then I still end up digging through shitty cheap roku channels occasionally to find stuff. Mostly just schlock, but I saw, for example, niche titles like Millennium Actress, Ninja Scroll, and Ghost in the Shell 2 on free services.
The idea of one streaming service that has it all is dead, but it kind of reminds me of DVD bundles at Walmart. 10 Sci Fi movies for $10, and one of them will be Existenz and the rest will be straight to TV or DVD.
Yes, all of his movies are absolutely brilliant. Big fan of his work, especially, Millennium Actress and Paprika. He is one of the best anime movie directors of all time. It's sad that he died at a young age.
Sadly, it's kind of hard for me to come up with good hacker movies, but I can at least try to make a recommendation of interest to (most) hackers: Paprika. It's an anime film (by the same team that brought us Perfect Blue and Millennium Actress) that explores the ramifications of a device that allows someone to interact with someone else's dreams. Like I said, not a hacker movie per se, but I think it's one that most hackers will probably like.