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Category:    Home > Reviews > Drama > Foreign > Asian > Dolls (2002)

Dolls (2002)

 

Picture: B-     Sound: B-     Extras: C+     Film: B-

 

 

Takeshi Kitano is the director of the new Zatoichi film that has been an international hit, more remarkable since he also stars in them.  Just before this success, the incredibly strong influence Akira Kurosawa and love for Bunraku doll theater can be seen in his 2002 drama Dolls, now on DVD from Palm Pictures.  Like Kurosawa’s underrated Dreams (reviewed elsewhere on this site), this film also references such figures and offers several stories.  Unlike the Kurosawa work, these stories are not presented as anthology, but intertwined and there are only three of them.

 

One segment has a electro-pop star have to deal with disfigurement at the same she meets her number one fan, an aging Yakuza leader tries to go back to the past by going to a park where he met an early girlfriend, and a couple wonder around whole having only a long red strap of cloth between them.  The entire point of the film is to study the character of people who have some lifetime consistency suddenly change by circumstance and see how they react.  Though not as “dreamlike” or profound as the Kurosawa film, which had a different agenda in many ways, Dolls tries to show the surface of these people vividly before going deeper into who they are.

 

The pop star segment is the weakest, as there were issues believing she was so popular and a hit, with the music sounding like a hundred repetitious tunes stuck on the many TV Animé titles we have covered on this site so far.  With that said, I liked how the film took its time in pacing with the characters, who are developed well enough for the most part.  It is a nice change-of-pace, especially for all the mixed Asian cinema we have seen lately.  We have seen some of this before, but it is still a pleasant experience and definitely worth a look.

 

Another reason to look is the fine cinematography, shot by Katsumi Yanagijima, presented here in an anamorphically enhanced 1.78 X 1 frame.  Though some fine detail is still lacking, this looks good and the source print is very clean.  The only issue is that the use of red is particularly strong and even digital High Definition has problems capturing it above all other colors in the spectrum.  The disc holds its red well, but this has limits.  The sound was theatrical Dolby Digital and the DVD features a Dolby Digital 5.1 mix that is not bad, though I kept wishing it was in DTS for being so well recorded.  I liked the use of silence as much as sound, another thing we could go back to Kurosawa about in terms of smart uses of multi-channel stereo.  Extras include trailers for this and four other Palm Pictures DVD release, weblinks, and four interviews not noted on the back of the DVD case with two of the leads, Kitano and costume designer Yohji Yamamoto.  Each question is chapterized and they run about a half-hour combined.  All are subtitled, except for Yamamoto’s segment, which is in English.  All in all, this is very much worth a look.

 

 

-   Nicholas Sheffo


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