From the moment OpenAI CEO Sam Altman stepped onstage, it was clear this was not going to be a normal interview.
Altman and his chief operating officer, Brad Lightcap, stood awkwardly toward the back of the stage at a jam-packed San Francisco venue that typically hosts jazz concerts. Hundreds of people filled steep theatre-style seating on Tuesday night to watch Kevin Roose, a columnist with The New York Times, and Platformer’s Casey Newton record a live episode of their popular technology podcast, Hard Fork.
Altman and Lightcap were the main event, but they’d walked out too early. Roose explained that he and Newton were planning to — ideally, before OpenAI’s executives were supposed to come out — list off several headlines that had been written about OpenAI in the weeks leading up to the event.
“This is more fun that we’re out here for this,” said Altman. Seconds later, the OpenAI CEO asked, “Are you going to talk about where you sue us because you don’t like user privacy?”
Within minutes of the program starting, Altman hijacked the conversation to talk about The New York Times lawsuit against OpenAI and its largest investor, Microsoft, in which the publisher alleges that Altman’s company improperly used its articles to train large language models. Altman was particularly peeved about a recent development in the lawsuit, in which lawyers representing The New York Times asked OpenAI to retain consumer ChatGPT and API customer data.
“The New York Times, one of the great institutions, truly, for a long time, is taking a position that we should have to preserve our users’ logs even if they’re chatting in private mode, even if they’ve asked us to delete them,” said Altman. “Still love The New York Times, but that one we feel strongly about.”
For a few minutes, OpenAI’s CEO pressed the podcasters to share their personal opinions about the New York Times lawsuit — they demurred, noting that as journalists whose work appears in The New York Times, they are not involved in the lawsuit.
Altman and Lightcap’s brash entrance lasted only a few minutes, and the rest of the interview proceeded, seemingly, as planned. However, the flare-up felt indicative of the inflection point Silicon Valley seems to be approaching in its relationship with the media industry.
In the last several years, multiple publishers have brought lawsuits against OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Meta for training their AI models on copyrighted works. At a high level, these lawsuits argue that AI models have the potential to devalue, and even replace, the copyrighted works produced by media institutions.
But the tides may be turning in favor of the tech companies. Earlier this week, OpenAI competitor Anthropic received a major win in its legal battle against publishers. A federal judge ruled that Anthropic’s use of books to train its AI models was legal in some circumstances, which could have broad implications for other publishers’ lawsuits against OpenAI, Google, and Meta.
Perhaps Altman and Lightcap felt emboldened by the industry win heading into their live interview with The New York Times journalists. But these days, OpenAI is fending off threats from every direction, and that became clear throughout the night.
Mark Zuckerberg has recently been trying to recruit OpenAI’s top talent by offering them $100 million compensation packages to join Meta’s AI superintelligence lab, Altman revealed weeks ago on his brother’s podcast.
When asked whether the Meta CEO really believes in superintelligent AI systems, or if it’s just a recruiting strategy, Lightcap quipped: “I think [Zuckerberg] believes he is superintelligent.”
Later, Roose asked Altman about OpenAI’s relationship with Microsoft, which has reportedly been pushed to a boiling point in recent months as the partners negotiate a new contract. While Microsoft was once a major accelerant to OpenAI, the two are now competing in enterprise software and other domains.
“In any deep partnership, there are points of tension and we certainly have those,” said Altman. “We’re both ambitious companies, so we do find some flashpoints, but I would expect that it is something that we find deep value in for both sides for a very long time to come.”
OpenAI’s leadership today seems to spend a lot of time swatting down competitors and lawsuits. That may get in the way of OpenAI’s ability to solve broader issues around AI, such as how to safely deploy highly intelligent AI systems at scale.
At one point, Newton asked OpenAI’s leaders how they were thinking about recent stories of mentally unstable people using ChatGPT to traverse dangerous rabbit holes, including to discuss conspiracy theories or suicide with the chatbot.
Altman said OpenAI takes many steps to prevent these conversations, such as by cutting them off early, or directing users to professional services where they can get help.
“We don’t want to slide into the mistakes that I think the previous generation of tech companies made by not reacting quickly enough,” said Altman. To a follow-up question, the OpenAI CEO added, “However, to users that are in a fragile enough mental place, that are on the edge of a psychotic break, we haven’t yet figured out how a warning gets through.”
Source link
#Sam #Altman #swinging #York #Times
![‘Millennium Actress’ Will Always Be My Favorite Satoshi Kon Film
Director Guillermo del Toro once compared watching a movie for the first time to going on a blind date. The first date is flirtatious with promise; the second go-around is the proper date. By the time you rewatch a movie three or four more times, you’ve graduated to marriage. In all my years watching anime for work and leisure, there’s no film I’ve felt married to as much as I do toward Satoshi Kon’s finest film, Millennium Actress. Unlike Kon’s showier film, which pushes animation to the forefront with adult themes by front-loading its opening moments with dreamlike imagery that provokes you into unease and awe-struck wonder, Millennium Actress‘ brand of phantasmal imagery doesn’t flourish in magical realism, horror, or yuletide merriment. Millennium Actress blossoms in the hazy-bright subjectivity and romanticization of memory. Namely, the memory of former showbiz actress Chiyoko Fujiwara (JP: Fumiko Orikasa, Mami Koyama; EN: Abby Trott, Erin Yvette, Cindy Robinson). When a reporter and his cameraman make a pilgrimage to Chiyoko’s home for an interview recounting her career, they wind up traveling through her memories and films. Chiyoko regales her guests, reminiscing about being a child during World War II, the mysterious man she helped flee from police officers, the promise they made to each other, and how his sudden disappearance led her to pursue stardom in cinema. Her hope was that she’d be so successful they’d have no choice but to reunite someday by the sheer gravitational force of her star power—if he’s even still alive. With her storied career behind her, Chiyoko’s life is spent longing forever and a day for a reunion that may never come.
[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mWGRmtTUkvg[/embed] While the surface-level intrigue of a journalist interviewing a subject isn’t lost on me, given my vocation, the 2001 film feels like my personal cinematic Amigara fault; what perpetually strikes me about Kon’s film is how it takes its otherwise pleasantly banal story on the page and breathes vibrant life into it through artistry the likes of which the anime industry may never see again. Kon’s blocking and camera work have already been praised to death, and rightfully so, as the stuff film students study to understand scene setting, and Studio Madhouse’s creative efforts with Millennium Actress are no exception. What gets me invigorated about Millennium Actress whenever the film crosses my mind in my day-to-day is how it plays with memory as an active, living tapestry over the static, absolute depictions of it I’ve encountered in other media.
As Chiyoko recounts the chapters of her life—her humble beginnings in film, the trials and tribulations she faced to become a household name for a time—her audience in both viewers and the journalists who’re guests in her home are struck with the poignant sense that her life is one of pyrrhic victories. No matter how big she got, the goalpost was to be big enough that her assumed paramour would find her from her own clout, and they’d reunite in the most saccharine way imaginable; it never manifests as the reward at the end of her hard-earned journey—a journey that rivals the millennia her visage graces immortalized in celluloid. It’s Sisyphean, and the pain of being trapped recounting her trek up to this point feels less like a trip down memory lane and more like a prison behind the guardrails of her all-encompassing dissatisfactions. © Madhouse/GKIDS/HBO Max Then something magical happens. In the way memory isn’t us replaying events exactly as they occurred but reconstructing them from our own fallibly human recountenances, Chiyoko breaks free from the script of her own memory, transforming it into a lucid dream where her agency is superimposed over the roles she played, giving her the power to pursue the man she spent years waiting for. This, in turn, transports both the journalists and audiences into the fabric of the fantastical roles she’s played, referencing a pastiche of real-life cinema, including Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood, Ishirō Honda’s Godzilla, and Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, as Chiyoko flips the script on the very fabric of her life’s narrative to arrive at her truth.
Along that journey, Kon weaves a stirring, imaginative, sobering tale integrating the universal pang of life, life’s regrets, and what we make of what’s left when we approach our final curtain calls, looking back on the journey we faced to get to our final destination. And the answer Chiyoko arrives at as the film bookends itself, as she’s sat in the cockpit of a space rocket set for the stars, is etched in my soul forever. I treasure Millennium Actress so much that I nearly went into orbit myself when I interviewed Lady Snowblood actress Meiko Kaji during a Japan Society retrospective event earlier this year celebrating her 60-year career. It took nearly every fiber of my being to maintain my cool as my prepped questions for our Zoom interview made me realize I was put smack dab in the same scenario as Millennium Actress‘ journalists. Like them, I was interviewing and guffawing at the answers I received, which landed beyond the scope of what I could’ve ever hoped for from an actress whom I had the awesome responsibility to encapsulate a career that doubled my own lifetime. Like Chiyoko, Meiko never intended to be an actress at all. But through stubborn determination woven within the woman behind the character actress, she made a way out of no way. That shit means something to me, man. [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfnRYdTpzbs[/embed] Whether it’s Wong Kar-wai, Studio Ghibli, or the late-great dreamscape auteur, Satoshi Kon, everyone’s got their favorites from an eclectic creative’s body of work. Sometimes those favorites coincide with their indelible effects on both pop culture and their status as poster children for their visual ethos—your In the Mood for Love, Spirited Away, and Perfect Blue.
But my favorites of the bunch tend to be those with middle-child syndrome in their remarkable films. I’m enamored of how Kar-wai reverse-engineered the quantum Zeno effect of doomed romance and yearning in Happy Together; how Studio Ghibli told a timeless tale of environmentalism against industry and love caught in the crossfire in Princess Mononoke. But most of all, I’m moved by Kon’s beautiful tale of an actress reminiscing over her years spent hounding after an unattainable goal not to reach it, but for the thrill of the chase. Millennium Actress is streaming on HBO Max. Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who. #Millennium #Actress #Favorite #Satoshi #Kon #FilmAnime,GKids,Madhouse,Millennium Actress,Satoshi Kon](https://gizmodo.com/app/uploads/2026/07/Millennium-Actress.jpg "‘Millennium Actress’ Will Always Be My Favorite Satoshi Kon Film
Director Guillermo del Toro once compared watching a movie for the first time to going on a blind date. The first date is flirtatious with promise; the second go-around is the proper date. By the time you rewatch a movie three or four more times, you’ve graduated to marriage. In all my years watching anime for work and leisure, there’s no film I’ve felt married to as much as I do toward Satoshi Kon’s finest film, Millennium Actress. Unlike Kon’s showier film, which pushes animation to the forefront with adult themes by front-loading its opening moments with dreamlike imagery that provokes you into unease and awe-struck wonder, Millennium Actress‘ brand of phantasmal imagery doesn’t flourish in magical realism, horror, or yuletide merriment. Millennium Actress blossoms in the hazy-bright subjectivity and romanticization of memory. Namely, the memory of former showbiz actress Chiyoko Fujiwara (JP: Fumiko Orikasa, Mami Koyama; EN: Abby Trott, Erin Yvette, Cindy Robinson). When a reporter and his cameraman make a pilgrimage to Chiyoko’s home for an interview recounting her career, they wind up traveling through her memories and films. Chiyoko regales her guests, reminiscing about being a child during World War II, the mysterious man she helped flee from police officers, the promise they made to each other, and how his sudden disappearance led her to pursue stardom in cinema. Her hope was that she’d be so successful they’d have no choice but to reunite someday by the sheer gravitational force of her star power—if he’s even still alive. With her storied career behind her, Chiyoko’s life is spent longing forever and a day for a reunion that may never come.
[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mWGRmtTUkvg[/embed] While the surface-level intrigue of a journalist interviewing a subject isn’t lost on me, given my vocation, the 2001 film feels like my personal cinematic Amigara fault; what perpetually strikes me about Kon’s film is how it takes its otherwise pleasantly banal story on the page and breathes vibrant life into it through artistry the likes of which the anime industry may never see again. Kon’s blocking and camera work have already been praised to death, and rightfully so, as the stuff film students study to understand scene setting, and Studio Madhouse’s creative efforts with Millennium Actress are no exception. What gets me invigorated about Millennium Actress whenever the film crosses my mind in my day-to-day is how it plays with memory as an active, living tapestry over the static, absolute depictions of it I’ve encountered in other media.
As Chiyoko recounts the chapters of her life—her humble beginnings in film, the trials and tribulations she faced to become a household name for a time—her audience in both viewers and the journalists who’re guests in her home are struck with the poignant sense that her life is one of pyrrhic victories. No matter how big she got, the goalpost was to be big enough that her assumed paramour would find her from her own clout, and they’d reunite in the most saccharine way imaginable; it never manifests as the reward at the end of her hard-earned journey—a journey that rivals the millennia her visage graces immortalized in celluloid. It’s Sisyphean, and the pain of being trapped recounting her trek up to this point feels less like a trip down memory lane and more like a prison behind the guardrails of her all-encompassing dissatisfactions. © Madhouse/GKIDS/HBO Max Then something magical happens. In the way memory isn’t us replaying events exactly as they occurred but reconstructing them from our own fallibly human recountenances, Chiyoko breaks free from the script of her own memory, transforming it into a lucid dream where her agency is superimposed over the roles she played, giving her the power to pursue the man she spent years waiting for. This, in turn, transports both the journalists and audiences into the fabric of the fantastical roles she’s played, referencing a pastiche of real-life cinema, including Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood, Ishirō Honda’s Godzilla, and Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, as Chiyoko flips the script on the very fabric of her life’s narrative to arrive at her truth.
Along that journey, Kon weaves a stirring, imaginative, sobering tale integrating the universal pang of life, life’s regrets, and what we make of what’s left when we approach our final curtain calls, looking back on the journey we faced to get to our final destination. And the answer Chiyoko arrives at as the film bookends itself, as she’s sat in the cockpit of a space rocket set for the stars, is etched in my soul forever. I treasure Millennium Actress so much that I nearly went into orbit myself when I interviewed Lady Snowblood actress Meiko Kaji during a Japan Society retrospective event earlier this year celebrating her 60-year career. It took nearly every fiber of my being to maintain my cool as my prepped questions for our Zoom interview made me realize I was put smack dab in the same scenario as Millennium Actress‘ journalists. Like them, I was interviewing and guffawing at the answers I received, which landed beyond the scope of what I could’ve ever hoped for from an actress whom I had the awesome responsibility to encapsulate a career that doubled my own lifetime. Like Chiyoko, Meiko never intended to be an actress at all. But through stubborn determination woven within the woman behind the character actress, she made a way out of no way. That shit means something to me, man. [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfnRYdTpzbs[/embed] Whether it’s Wong Kar-wai, Studio Ghibli, or the late-great dreamscape auteur, Satoshi Kon, everyone’s got their favorites from an eclectic creative’s body of work. Sometimes those favorites coincide with their indelible effects on both pop culture and their status as poster children for their visual ethos—your In the Mood for Love, Spirited Away, and Perfect Blue.
But my favorites of the bunch tend to be those with middle-child syndrome in their remarkable films. I’m enamored of how Kar-wai reverse-engineered the quantum Zeno effect of doomed romance and yearning in Happy Together; how Studio Ghibli told a timeless tale of environmentalism against industry and love caught in the crossfire in Princess Mononoke. But most of all, I’m moved by Kon’s beautiful tale of an actress reminiscing over her years spent hounding after an unattainable goal not to reach it, but for the thrill of the chase. Millennium Actress is streaming on HBO Max. Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who. #Millennium #Actress #Favorite #Satoshi #Kon #FilmAnime,GKids,Madhouse,Millennium Actress,Satoshi Kon")
![‘Millennium Actress’ Will Always Be My Favorite Satoshi Kon Film
Director Guillermo del Toro once compared watching a movie for the first time to going on a blind date. The first date is flirtatious with promise; the second go-around is the proper date. By the time you rewatch a movie three or four more times, you’ve graduated to marriage. In all my years watching anime for work and leisure, there’s no film I’ve felt married to as much as I do toward Satoshi Kon’s finest film, Millennium Actress. Unlike Kon’s showier film, which pushes animation to the forefront with adult themes by front-loading its opening moments with dreamlike imagery that provokes you into unease and awe-struck wonder, Millennium Actress‘ brand of phantasmal imagery doesn’t flourish in magical realism, horror, or yuletide merriment. Millennium Actress blossoms in the hazy-bright subjectivity and romanticization of memory. Namely, the memory of former showbiz actress Chiyoko Fujiwara (JP: Fumiko Orikasa, Mami Koyama; EN: Abby Trott, Erin Yvette, Cindy Robinson). When a reporter and his cameraman make a pilgrimage to Chiyoko’s home for an interview recounting her career, they wind up traveling through her memories and films. Chiyoko regales her guests, reminiscing about being a child during World War II, the mysterious man she helped flee from police officers, the promise they made to each other, and how his sudden disappearance led her to pursue stardom in cinema. Her hope was that she’d be so successful they’d have no choice but to reunite someday by the sheer gravitational force of her star power—if he’s even still alive. With her storied career behind her, Chiyoko’s life is spent longing forever and a day for a reunion that may never come.
[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mWGRmtTUkvg[/embed] While the surface-level intrigue of a journalist interviewing a subject isn’t lost on me, given my vocation, the 2001 film feels like my personal cinematic Amigara fault; what perpetually strikes me about Kon’s film is how it takes its otherwise pleasantly banal story on the page and breathes vibrant life into it through artistry the likes of which the anime industry may never see again. Kon’s blocking and camera work have already been praised to death, and rightfully so, as the stuff film students study to understand scene setting, and Studio Madhouse’s creative efforts with Millennium Actress are no exception. What gets me invigorated about Millennium Actress whenever the film crosses my mind in my day-to-day is how it plays with memory as an active, living tapestry over the static, absolute depictions of it I’ve encountered in other media.
As Chiyoko recounts the chapters of her life—her humble beginnings in film, the trials and tribulations she faced to become a household name for a time—her audience in both viewers and the journalists who’re guests in her home are struck with the poignant sense that her life is one of pyrrhic victories. No matter how big she got, the goalpost was to be big enough that her assumed paramour would find her from her own clout, and they’d reunite in the most saccharine way imaginable; it never manifests as the reward at the end of her hard-earned journey—a journey that rivals the millennia her visage graces immortalized in celluloid. It’s Sisyphean, and the pain of being trapped recounting her trek up to this point feels less like a trip down memory lane and more like a prison behind the guardrails of her all-encompassing dissatisfactions. © Madhouse/GKIDS/HBO Max Then something magical happens. In the way memory isn’t us replaying events exactly as they occurred but reconstructing them from our own fallibly human recountenances, Chiyoko breaks free from the script of her own memory, transforming it into a lucid dream where her agency is superimposed over the roles she played, giving her the power to pursue the man she spent years waiting for. This, in turn, transports both the journalists and audiences into the fabric of the fantastical roles she’s played, referencing a pastiche of real-life cinema, including Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood, Ishirō Honda’s Godzilla, and Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, as Chiyoko flips the script on the very fabric of her life’s narrative to arrive at her truth.
Along that journey, Kon weaves a stirring, imaginative, sobering tale integrating the universal pang of life, life’s regrets, and what we make of what’s left when we approach our final curtain calls, looking back on the journey we faced to get to our final destination. And the answer Chiyoko arrives at as the film bookends itself, as she’s sat in the cockpit of a space rocket set for the stars, is etched in my soul forever. I treasure Millennium Actress so much that I nearly went into orbit myself when I interviewed Lady Snowblood actress Meiko Kaji during a Japan Society retrospective event earlier this year celebrating her 60-year career. It took nearly every fiber of my being to maintain my cool as my prepped questions for our Zoom interview made me realize I was put smack dab in the same scenario as Millennium Actress‘ journalists. Like them, I was interviewing and guffawing at the answers I received, which landed beyond the scope of what I could’ve ever hoped for from an actress whom I had the awesome responsibility to encapsulate a career that doubled my own lifetime. Like Chiyoko, Meiko never intended to be an actress at all. But through stubborn determination woven within the woman behind the character actress, she made a way out of no way. That shit means something to me, man. [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfnRYdTpzbs[/embed] Whether it’s Wong Kar-wai, Studio Ghibli, or the late-great dreamscape auteur, Satoshi Kon, everyone’s got their favorites from an eclectic creative’s body of work. Sometimes those favorites coincide with their indelible effects on both pop culture and their status as poster children for their visual ethos—your In the Mood for Love, Spirited Away, and Perfect Blue.
But my favorites of the bunch tend to be those with middle-child syndrome in their remarkable films. I’m enamored of how Kar-wai reverse-engineered the quantum Zeno effect of doomed romance and yearning in Happy Together; how Studio Ghibli told a timeless tale of environmentalism against industry and love caught in the crossfire in Princess Mononoke. But most of all, I’m moved by Kon’s beautiful tale of an actress reminiscing over her years spent hounding after an unattainable goal not to reach it, but for the thrill of the chase. Millennium Actress is streaming on HBO Max. Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who. #Millennium #Actress #Favorite #Satoshi #Kon #FilmAnime,GKids,Madhouse,Millennium Actress,Satoshi Kon](https://i3.wp.com/gizmodo.com/app/uploads/2026/07/Millennium-Actress.jpg?ssl=1 "‘Millennium Actress’ Will Always Be My Favorite Satoshi Kon Film
Director Guillermo del Toro once compared watching a movie for the first time to going on a blind date. The first date is flirtatious with promise; the second go-around is the proper date. By the time you rewatch a movie three or four more times, you’ve graduated to marriage. In all my years watching anime for work and leisure, there’s no film I’ve felt married to as much as I do toward Satoshi Kon’s finest film, Millennium Actress. Unlike Kon’s showier film, which pushes animation to the forefront with adult themes by front-loading its opening moments with dreamlike imagery that provokes you into unease and awe-struck wonder, Millennium Actress‘ brand of phantasmal imagery doesn’t flourish in magical realism, horror, or yuletide merriment. Millennium Actress blossoms in the hazy-bright subjectivity and romanticization of memory. Namely, the memory of former showbiz actress Chiyoko Fujiwara (JP: Fumiko Orikasa, Mami Koyama; EN: Abby Trott, Erin Yvette, Cindy Robinson). When a reporter and his cameraman make a pilgrimage to Chiyoko’s home for an interview recounting her career, they wind up traveling through her memories and films. Chiyoko regales her guests, reminiscing about being a child during World War II, the mysterious man she helped flee from police officers, the promise they made to each other, and how his sudden disappearance led her to pursue stardom in cinema. Her hope was that she’d be so successful they’d have no choice but to reunite someday by the sheer gravitational force of her star power—if he’s even still alive. With her storied career behind her, Chiyoko’s life is spent longing forever and a day for a reunion that may never come.
[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mWGRmtTUkvg[/embed] While the surface-level intrigue of a journalist interviewing a subject isn’t lost on me, given my vocation, the 2001 film feels like my personal cinematic Amigara fault; what perpetually strikes me about Kon’s film is how it takes its otherwise pleasantly banal story on the page and breathes vibrant life into it through artistry the likes of which the anime industry may never see again. Kon’s blocking and camera work have already been praised to death, and rightfully so, as the stuff film students study to understand scene setting, and Studio Madhouse’s creative efforts with Millennium Actress are no exception. What gets me invigorated about Millennium Actress whenever the film crosses my mind in my day-to-day is how it plays with memory as an active, living tapestry over the static, absolute depictions of it I’ve encountered in other media.
As Chiyoko recounts the chapters of her life—her humble beginnings in film, the trials and tribulations she faced to become a household name for a time—her audience in both viewers and the journalists who’re guests in her home are struck with the poignant sense that her life is one of pyrrhic victories. No matter how big she got, the goalpost was to be big enough that her assumed paramour would find her from her own clout, and they’d reunite in the most saccharine way imaginable; it never manifests as the reward at the end of her hard-earned journey—a journey that rivals the millennia her visage graces immortalized in celluloid. It’s Sisyphean, and the pain of being trapped recounting her trek up to this point feels less like a trip down memory lane and more like a prison behind the guardrails of her all-encompassing dissatisfactions. © Madhouse/GKIDS/HBO Max Then something magical happens. In the way memory isn’t us replaying events exactly as they occurred but reconstructing them from our own fallibly human recountenances, Chiyoko breaks free from the script of her own memory, transforming it into a lucid dream where her agency is superimposed over the roles she played, giving her the power to pursue the man she spent years waiting for. This, in turn, transports both the journalists and audiences into the fabric of the fantastical roles she’s played, referencing a pastiche of real-life cinema, including Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood, Ishirō Honda’s Godzilla, and Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, as Chiyoko flips the script on the very fabric of her life’s narrative to arrive at her truth.
Along that journey, Kon weaves a stirring, imaginative, sobering tale integrating the universal pang of life, life’s regrets, and what we make of what’s left when we approach our final curtain calls, looking back on the journey we faced to get to our final destination. And the answer Chiyoko arrives at as the film bookends itself, as she’s sat in the cockpit of a space rocket set for the stars, is etched in my soul forever. I treasure Millennium Actress so much that I nearly went into orbit myself when I interviewed Lady Snowblood actress Meiko Kaji during a Japan Society retrospective event earlier this year celebrating her 60-year career. It took nearly every fiber of my being to maintain my cool as my prepped questions for our Zoom interview made me realize I was put smack dab in the same scenario as Millennium Actress‘ journalists. Like them, I was interviewing and guffawing at the answers I received, which landed beyond the scope of what I could’ve ever hoped for from an actress whom I had the awesome responsibility to encapsulate a career that doubled my own lifetime. Like Chiyoko, Meiko never intended to be an actress at all. But through stubborn determination woven within the woman behind the character actress, she made a way out of no way. That shit means something to me, man. [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfnRYdTpzbs[/embed] Whether it’s Wong Kar-wai, Studio Ghibli, or the late-great dreamscape auteur, Satoshi Kon, everyone’s got their favorites from an eclectic creative’s body of work. Sometimes those favorites coincide with their indelible effects on both pop culture and their status as poster children for their visual ethos—your In the Mood for Love, Spirited Away, and Perfect Blue.
But my favorites of the bunch tend to be those with middle-child syndrome in their remarkable films. I’m enamored of how Kar-wai reverse-engineered the quantum Zeno effect of doomed romance and yearning in Happy Together; how Studio Ghibli told a timeless tale of environmentalism against industry and love caught in the crossfire in Princess Mononoke. But most of all, I’m moved by Kon’s beautiful tale of an actress reminiscing over her years spent hounding after an unattainable goal not to reach it, but for the thrill of the chase. Millennium Actress is streaming on HBO Max. Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who. #Millennium #Actress #Favorite #Satoshi #Kon #FilmAnime,GKids,Madhouse,Millennium Actress,Satoshi Kon")
Post Comment