Steineded How sad is this?

Pluskylang Great Film overall

MoPoshy Absolutely brilliant

Allison Davies The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

missraze Thankfully I had seen "Amelie" and "Run Lola Run/Lola Rennt" before watching this. In all three films the usage of music as a prop, bold coloring, different speeds, odd and interesting angles, vivid cinematography, flashbacks, surrealism, eccentric characters, animated graphics, and other features of what I would call Expressionism, come to the fore, the entirety of the films' duration, each.Amelie, for all its uniqueness, was actually at the end of it all rather boring, despite looking like a painting that's come to life, with an army of quirky people leaping out into a musical number of a film. (When it was finished each of the several times I watched it and honestly did enjoy it, I honestly didn't feel much connection to the characters though I understand exactly what their significance to the story is.) There's other odd French films, called "Micmacs" and "Delicatessen." By I think the same director as Amelie. At 1st I thought this was just a French style. But the bizarre visuals and retrospective storytelling seem to be characteristic of the filmmaker. So perhaps the director of "Memories of Matsuko" is pulling directly from Amelie's influence and not a broad genre of French film that I thought existed lol I mention Amelie and Run Lola Run and these other films because they did train my mind and eyes to this kind of artistry. But with Matsuko, it was not just used as an excuse to be odd and creative, like Amelie, but here it was completely necessary. In the 1st few minutes I was about to click this movie off, with the vaudevillian and fairy tale stuff and highly saturated colors; I wanted a taste of real life, modern Japan tied into a wowing film and the initial presence of Matsuko did not fulfill that. But after coming to review "Bounce KO Gals," a Japanese lolita film, I saw someone link other lolita films like "Kamikaze Girls" to "World of Kanako," to this film. And in liking those story lines and way of filming, I gave Matsuko a chance.Since then, I figured that the whimsy of the song-and-dance style and harp playing and twinkle dust introducing this film was completely sarcastic. And it was. The unbearable interludes of musicals lasted briefly, popped up minimally, but they and the intense colors sooner than later showed their purpose: Matsuko was a lonely child with a vivid imagination, and went to the carnival with her dad as a kid and they saw theatrical plays. That was the film's only moment of he and her bonding.So the musicals and coloring just visually expresses Matsuko's mental and emotional state. It introduced the rapid on screen downfall of our titular character, Matsuko herself. And it made me tear up. But I actually let the tears storm down when she was older and visited back home well into her extraordinarily troubled adulthood. I saw someone around here write that they didn't quite get the last scene with Matsuko as a child and then as an adult peacefully singing her utopian theme song as she climbed up the stairs to a heavenlike light shining down from her childhood bedroom, with her deceased sister angelically awaiting her to reach the top, whilst every friend and ex Matsuko had sung along in misery.How can they not get this? Are they a sociopath or what? Maybe they've never been sad and daydreamed before so good for them but when you know you're unloved you then fantasize about being loved, or at least your former tormentors repenting how horribly they treated you, as you triumph how you realistically never did or would or could. And that's what the last scene shows. It was similar to Pan's Labyrinth, showing a finally happy Ophelia in a fanciful paradise; as her actual self took her last breaths, the make-believe Ophelia was being applauded by a kingdom and praised by her long dead parents. That too made me cry then. I realise this is what the director was doing here, not necessarily taking cues exactly from Pan.It's just a trait of Expressionism I think, to visually and musically express the inside of its characters; it gives you everything you could ever ask for in order to understand what's going on and who's who. So it's used in "rom-coms" and horror films, and makes the films very popular. While I appreciated it, Impressionism, which I honestly prefer, doesn't do that. It uses exactly what's there and that's it, might not even have music in the whole film; it instead uses social and historical context as well as natural scenery to describe the characters. It's normally used in indie drama films, which are rarely as popular as expressionistic films but normally more critically acclaimed for their realism.But for once I appreciated expressionism here. Because I totally understood why it was applied. Not just for eye popping kicks, which could almost force you to clutch your cheeks in painful dismay, begging for it to stop. But to show the viewer how alone and increasingly unstable Matsuko became, dwelling into a world of make believe and as she aged, hallucinations. So the fact that the film looked like you just dropped and popped acid kinda goes along with that, as opposed to Amelie which is gratuitously quirky and weird, just for the sake of being so. That being said, I liked Amelie but it had no personal affect on me. It taught me nothing. But how to giggle at an Arab immigrant struggling to pronounce French names, and how to sit through 2 hours of psychedelia.

little-greenmen The main character, Matsuko Kawaziri is very strange person. However, I like her because her ideas and actions are cute. She is always falls in love with bad boys. For instance, the man or the fight without reason or act of violence to her, but even she is reserved the terrible actions, she still loves them. Miki Nakatani is so beautiful, but she could show us the funny face and Matsuko's the felt looks. Last scene, her beauty couldn't see, and this is evidence of she is a great actress. Also role of her nephew, Eita matched the corrupted young man. I can't guess he will do in the future, but I could see his growth since he began to know about him aunt. In the other view, the supporting actors were richly. A lot of actors and comedians were appealing, so I thought we can enjoy this movie many times. I can't tell you the ending, so you should watch this movie soon!

mary quant One day, a woman is dismissed from her job and her stormy life starts. This movie describes a woman's lifetime. Her name is Matsuko and she is very unfortunate woman. In this movie, she meets with misfortunes one after another. I first watch this movie, I think this is a wonderful movie. Although the story of this movie is so simple, after finishing watching this movie, I was made consider a meaning of life. Matsuko's life tells us importance of living as hard as we could, no matter how trying the circumstances. Another good points of this movie is that this movie develops the story with nice tempo. Direction of this movie is so comical, such as animations and music, so we can watch serious story delightfully. However, this movie is not only comical, but also moving. Matsuko teaches us importance thing, so I want many people watch this movie.

gunstar_hero At the beginning of "Memories of Matsuko", Matsuko Kawajiri, the eponymous heroine, is found murdered in a field under mysterious circumstances. She has died alone and estranged from her family. It is the task of her young nephew, Shou, to piece together the details of her extraordinary life, which we witness first hand in the form of vivid flashbacks to Matsuko's past, from wide-eyed childhood to disenchanted middle age. The result is something of a Japanese "Moll Flanders", by turns tragic and comic.The freedom with which writer-director Tetsuya Nakashima delves between past and present is the film's most satisfying aspect, coupled with a playfully thin boundary between reality and illusion: one moment the film is insistently realistic, with a limited, dark palette, the next it soars into Technicolor dreamscapes full of songs, flowers, butterflies and other recurring motifs. The cinematography is exquisite and endlessly creative. While this is an ultimately tragic biopic with a number of distressing scenes (not least the repeated incidence of domestic abuse), it is equally full of comedy, particularly during Matsuko's youthful stint as a schoolteacher. This freewheeling mixture of presentation and narrative tone will be quite unfamiliar to most English-speaking audiences, and better parallels can be found in French cinema – "Love Me if You Dare", for instance – or closer to Japan in the work of South Korean Chan-wook Park. At points "Memories of Matsuko" certainly recalls films like "I'm An Android, But That's OK" and the superb "Oldboy". After all, is anyone's life truly sad *or* happy? Our lives are full of joy and pain, elation and tragedy, and in that Matsuko's is little different.Yet Nakashima's visual fireworks are both a blessing and a curse. All too often the montages and singing substitute for proper characterisation and dialogue. At a number of points his cinematic shorthand leaves much to be desired: Matsuko's lengthy jail term, for instance, in which she is supposed to have formed a close friendship with Megumi, is reduced merely to a two-minute music video. Similarly, while Matsuko has various lovers whom she clings to, not once does she share a meaningful conversation with them. Nakashima seems to relish in depicting the dramatic, violent conclusions to these relationships, but the more prosaic task of day-to-day interaction – the real, quotidian essence of life – is almost entirely overlooked. Many of the characters populating the movies's vibrant surface feel two-dimensional, and Nakashima's screenplay shows less interest in taking the time to flesh them out, than it does in jumping forward to the next episode of Matsuko's life.For this reason I found it difficult to really identify with Matsuko and her world by the end, and I was left with a series of stunning vignettes that did not combine into a memorable, convincing whole. The last 10 minutes, indeed, are something of an embarrassment for Nakashima. His screenplay loses all sense of emotional verisimilitude and descends into an overblown, saccharine festival of nostalgia and string-sections which embodies the worst excesses of Japanese cinema. Its simplistic, quasi-religious moralizing is tacky and hollow: Matsuko's character and story really deserved a more complex ending, and certainly something more befitting of the movie's underlying uncertainty. The simple fact of her terrible murder in itself, which is almost unbearably realistic and difficult to watch, would perhaps have been the best place to fade-out.