January 10 movie: Paprika. Wow. Wow. What a movie. Animated film by the director of Millenium Actress and Tokyo Godfathers. It's fun and funny, and strange and creepy, and sad and beautiful, and even a little romantic. I can't recommend it highly enough.
In one of the DVD features they said it was rather loosely based on an experimental novel about the barrier breaking down between the real world and the world of dreams. The movie does an extremely good job of capturing the nonlinear, surreal quality of dreams. The author of the novel said that he didn't consciously invent any of the dream imagery; all of it was taken from his own actual dreams. Georg described that as "method writing" but I think it was a wise choice. It's difficult to make up a dream without it seeming silly and contrived (like the dwarf in Living in Oblivion). They said the movie isn't exactly the same as the book, but still I wouldn't be surprised if they had retained a lot of the dream imagery. There's an authentic strangeness to the dream world.
I just recognized a movie clip from Paprika! In the detective's recurring dream, when he acts out all the little movie scenes. There's one where they're at some kind of hoedown or county fair, and Paprika is standing on a chair and whacks a guy on the head with a guitar. That's a scene from a real movie! It shows up in a TCM promo for "The Essentials." It's blocked exactly the same: the angle, the position of the actors, the props, all the same. It goes by so fast that I can't tell for sure, but the female actor (the one Paprika acts out) looks like she might be Jean Simmons. I wonder what the movie is?