Netflix and chill, more like Plex server and hold on a sec I just need to fix this, gimme a second
Anyway I’m finally watching Perfect Blue but the subtitles aren’t appearing, so I guess I’m watching this by myself

@so Watched that maybe 20 years ago. I'm not sure I really "got it" back then, but I may also have had a cut edit of it.

Interested to hear what you think of it.

@DrCuriosity man, it was… unsettling. One of my greatest fears is psychotic episodes and being unable to tell reality, so it was really effective there. Perfect Blue is to Black Swan what Paprika is to Inception. The colourful, much more fucked up and darker version.
@DrCuriosity it’s really rewarding to close watch because there’s so much interlocking symbolism around glass and mirrors and doubles and so on. Kinda reminds me of Single White Female there too
@DrCuriosity watching it 25 years in the future, it’s actually pretty prescient around use of the internet for harassment and catfishing, given it predates the term catfishing by more than 10 years. None of the internet related stuff seems outright ridiculous watching it now, which is pretty neat
@DrCuriosity the plot is kind of a hot mess at times, but I love play within a play metatextual stuff so I gotta forgive it for that, plus I think the tightness of the visual symbolism compensates for it. I like the movie within a movie stuff also because it’s a precursor to Millennium Actress and to a lesser extent Paprika.
@DrCuriosity I do think the idol culture part is dated. If anything things are more fucked up now, since the movie predates the existence of AKB48. The 90s was also a period where pop groups represented by Johnny & Associates agency were really big, but sexual abuse allegations from that period are only finally being brought to light this year
@DrCuriosity one neat thing that’s i suspect is lost in translation: early in the movie Mima codeswitches when talking to her mother on the phone and speaks with a strong regional accent, which is another sign of the whole multiple identities thing
@DrCuriosity it doesn’t dethrone my favourite Satoshi Kon movie Millennium Actress, but I think I’d put it above Paprika because Paprika is all over the place visually in comparison

@so Appreciate your reflections, thank you :-)

I might have to give Paprika a watch soon - I honestly can't remember if I've seen that before or not.