The gang is back with a new format. Once a month we will dissect, critique and generally jabber about the oddities, the ignored or the duds in a famous director’s filmography. This month, we discuss Satoshi Kon’s debut Perfect Blue. Plus extra fun in the form of film chit-chat and a quiz! What’s not to love?!

0:00:00 – 0:29:30 – Have you missed them? The gang is all back to chat recent releases Ghostbusters, Adult Life Skills, Notes on Blindness and Elvis & Nixon, as well as bonus TV chat about The Living & The Dead.

0:29:30 – 0:51:40 – Quiz time! It’s The Vincent Price Is Right round 2! It turns into a giant slam of iMDB scores.

0:51:40 – 1:33:20 – In the first of our new format, we get into a deep dive of Satoshi Kon’s debut feature Perfect Blue. If you haven’t seen it, you should get that blu-ray, watch it and then come back to listen. We’ll wait.

1:33:20 – onwards – The outro!

Enjoy! Stream or download on the widget above or here if you can’t get that to work.

Hit us up with your favourite Satoshi Kon films in the comments below or by tweeting at us at @AHDPodcast or@samsheppard8 or @jonathanhatfull. You got choices, y’all.

Notes:

• I double-checked and I did roughly remember the Darren Aronofsky details correctly. There are some issues with cited articles no longer existing online, but you can get an idea of the slight controversies here.
• I would be completely remiss to not mention Tony Zhou’s wonderful visual essay on Satoshi Kon’s editing as part of his Every Frame A Painting series. Essential viewing.
• Finally, you don’t need to be a Satoshi Kon fan to get the most of this, so you should read his final blog post prior to his passing. It’s an incredibly moving piece that any mensch should read.

Music this month:

Japan – Ghosts

Motörhead – The Game

Susumu Hirasawa – Mediation Field