Before going any further, just watch this movie, okay? I can't talk about this thing without spoilers, so just watch it. Because it's only an hour and 21 minutes, and it's amazing, and it's disturbing, and it's mindbending, and I love it, and it's uploaded on YouTube in 720p for free in sub (sub better), or you can rent it for $2, and Darren Aronofsky bought the rights to it so he could copy it and make Black Swan (it's practically plagiarized from what I hear), and imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and if that doesn't convince you it's worth watching, I don't know what will, please, just watch it, it's so good.
I'm biased, I'll admit it. Perfect Blue is one of my favorite movies ever (I put it in my top 5), and this is my third time watching it. Not to digress too much, but I've noticed all 5 of my top movies are about existential horror of some kind that rips away control of your own life: End of Evangelion, you've got SPOILERS (I know you still haven't watched it yet), The Shining has the hotel that drives you mad, A Clockwork Orange is all about taking away somebody's free will to make them a "better person," and The Truman Show is about your whole life being a lie and every major choice in your life being part of a script you have no control over. Perfect Blue is no different; it takes the idea of losing your grip on the world and not knowing the difference between reality and illusion and cranks it up to 11. It's not just your average "X faces the struggles of Y and slowly delves into madness..." plot synopsis. It is such an absolute mind-heck of a movie, possibly the most confusing I have ever watched. For some anecdotal evidence, I didn't believe the ending on my first watch-through about a year ago (I think it was a year ago). I don't mean I was in disbelief, I literally mean I didn't think the last 10 or so minutes actually happened. Even when the movie spelled it out for me, I thought it was another trick, right until the credits rolled and even past then. Anyways, here's what I noticed my third time around watching this movie. Director Satoshi Kon makes you pay attention to a lot of tiny details, specifically when in Mima's room. For example, there's a scene a little before 3/4 of the way through the movie where... okay, so basically there's something that happens that should be impossible, but also we're not totally sure if it happened or not because some of it definitely happened, and all of it potentially could have happened, but also we don't trust that it actually happened how we saw it, but also we have an extremely unreliable narrator by this point, so we're left questioning how that thing happened. This movie does such a good job of putting you in Mima's confused, terrified shoes. By the time you get to the climax, you're not sure what's real and what's not. Little inconsistencies and details really act to disorient you. Scenes switch on a dime while the camera revolves around Mima, and the backgrounds change seamlessly from place to place. Satoshi Kon is known for playing with perception a lot, (I've seen Paprika, another movie he directed that actually directly inspired Inception, two very similar, very good movies), and he really knows how to make you question what's the real thing and what's nothing more than an illusion. The color red is used expertly in this movie. There's a whole video on YouTube just about the use of the color red in the film that goes into it better than I ever could. My favorite use, though, is about 1/4 of the way through the film, when Mima realizes that the person who's threatening her is also stalking her every move and uploading it all to a website they call Mima's Room. As she plays a voice clip of her very first line as an actress, stolen from her shoot only a few days prior, the track "Nightmare" kicks into high gear with heavy drums, and we get this great scene of her staring in distraught disbelief at her computer as her voice repeats over and over again, "Who are you?" and her curtain sways between her face and the camera with a haunting, deep red background. This is also my go-to scene to point to when recommending this movie to people. It doesn't give away too much but also makes the premise clear, and it also shows the director's skill and a little bit of the soundtrack. Link here, go watch. The soundtrack is amazing. "Virtual Mima" is one of the most haunting songs I've ever heard in a movie, period. Also, whatever drum motif the composer, Masahiro Ikumi, uses during "Nightmare" sounds like a cymbal being crashed against a train track, and it's just--mwah--chef's kiss. The whole soundtrack is one of the most memorable I've ever heard in a film, up there with the likes of The Shining and End of Eva, in my humble opinion. Perfect Blue gets a perfect 10/10. Watch it with subtitles, though. The dubbed version glosses over a super important detail in the very last line of the film for some reason, and honestly, the dub's already pretty meh anyways. The voice acting in the original Japanese version is just fantastic.
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