Paprika

[Mister_E]

Has anyone seen it yet it's a great film.

I am not good with These types of Threads to I'll let you take over.

[LordKefka]

In my opinion, I think Paprika is one of the weakest by Kon next to Paranoia Agent. Had a good idea but like Paranoia Agent, had a very abrupt ending which seemed very rushed. Now Magnetic Rose is a different story...

[Mister_E]

I've felt it's had it's moments. I wouldn't put it as the worst of the worst.

[LordKefka]

Well I don't mean Paprika was bad. It was fun to watch with a lot of artistic values and originality (with many Kon's works). I was just pointing out that Paprika was the weakest of the other Kon films out there, for example Perfect Blue, Millennium Actress, Tokyo Godfathers, and so forth.

If you want worse of the worst, try Genocyber, Ninja Resurrection, Tekkan: The Movie etc. Then again, I guess it's hard to say which is better than what when it comes to Kon. But yeah, good for you you watched Paprika. Check out his other stuff.

[Nyxyin]

had a very abrupt ending which seemed very rushed.

I agree that the ending didn't live up to the promise of the rest of the movie, but I liked the rest of the movie enough to forgive the ending, and now I'm very curious to read the novel.  Does anybody know if the novel has been translated to English yet?  Personally, I liked Paprika better than Millennium Actress overall.  I found Millennium Actress to be artistic, but it just didn't seem to have much to say to me.  (I adored Perfect Blue and Tokyo Godfathers, though.  I bought myself a set of Paranoia Agent DVDs, but I haven't watched it yet.)

[LordKefka]

Yeah, Millennium Actress had a very slow start, but I liked how it was paced despite the latter.

Paranoia Agent is like Paprika: it had a very interesting start which gets you hooked, then leaves you wondering what just happened. But I don't think anything by Kon is a bad watch. He's an awesome director who needs some spotlight beside Miyazaki. Shinkai is also another, which I will hold back on.

[Nyxyin]

it had a very interesting start which gets you hooked, then leaves you wondering what just happened.

But I think that's the best part of Satoshi Kon's work!  He has this way of blending what's real and imagined for his characters until the viewer doesn't know the difference between what the characters are actually going through and what is the result of their memory or psychosis.  I think it's a rather obvious yet deep comment about humans in that we only see reality through our own filters, and those filters -- our eyes, our minds, our fears, our hopes, our dreams, our memories, etc. -- can play tricks on us, and are we really sure that we know what we think we know?  It's somewhat the same message as the Matrix, but Satoshi Kon delivers it without beating the viewers over the head with a dead horse.

My complaint about Paprika is that the ending was very much obviously rushed, not that it was confusing.  There just seems to be so much more to the story that he didn't have time to tell.  The movie just wrapped things up in a rather action-packed Disney-esque "happily ever after" sort of superficial way that just doesn't seem to fit where things were going.  It's my complaint with Human Scramble as well: these characters are faced with complex problems that people spend a lifetime figuring out, but after building things up beautifully for 20 minutes, they suddenly drop some simplistic solution and make things look all nice and happy, as if a problem that's been systemic throughout society for multiple generations can be randomly fixed by just waking up on the right side of the bed one morning.

He's an awesome director who needs some spotlight beside Miyazaki. Shinkai is also another, which I will hold back on.

Why hold back on Shinkai?  ;)  (Maybe start a new thread!)  Shinkai's work is stunningly gorgeous!  I can come up with lots of criticisms about pretty much anything, but the fact remains that the works of each of them have a distinctive style and are excellent in their own ways.