Spice

We went to see the movie "Paprika" today. If you haven't seen it yet, the following paragraphs may contain spoilers. The short review is that it's a good movie, and you should go in expecting it to be strange. I should mention that it is in japanese and we saw it with english subtitles.

The longer review: There were a lot of interesting characters in this one, and I was pretty happy to see many different types. The story is based around some devices that allow someone to share another's dreams, and several of these getting stolen. The evil bad guy (tm) was pretty easy to guess, but exactly how he was evil and what really was up was extremely difficult to tell, partially because the line between reality and dream sequences was very thin at the best of times, and non-existent the rest of the time.

Of the characters in the movie, I really liked the story of the police captain - the movie starts (roughly) with a journey through his dreams, and later those same dreams are revisited through a different perspective and it really ties his story together. One of the other things I really liked were some of the traveling/chase scenes which involved Paprika - the changes she takes and the scenery jumps are extremely hard to predict and were really cool in that weird way.

The only thing I found a little odd was the ending. I think it made sense, but I dismissed an earlier scene as being important for a completely wrong reason, and so didn't notice some of the things which I should have in order to make the same scene near the ending actually make sense. It's hard to explain. Actually, the whole movie is hard to explain, I feel like I need to have a dvd of it handy and playing as a reference while trying to write about it.

So, I'll end with the comment that it was a good movie and worth seeing, just for the weirdness/surreal settings and the interesting characters.