The Hollywood machine can gobble up properties and hold onto them for years since there’s always a background potential for development as a feature film. One such work is Satoshi Kon’s film Millennium Actress, which was picked up by DreamWorks years ago and has been held by them since. That’s now in the hands of Paramount thanks to the shakeout of studios along the ways and now the Paramount Vault YouTube channel is streaming the film for free in its original Japanese language form with English Subtitles. It’s available in the US only as even Canada is disallowed.
Bandai Visual Japan released the film on Blu-ray back on February 21st, 2014. The feature, which was released in North America by DreamWorks back in 2003, was priced at 6090yen and will feature the 87 minute feature with four minutes of extras (trailers, TV spots) as well as a featurlengthhy commentary track by Satoshi Kon, sound director Masafumi Mima, and Chiyoko Fujiwara’s voice actresses Miyoko Shoji, Mami Koyama, and Fumiko Orikasa which was used in the previous DVD limited edition set years ago. The feature itself will provide a 5.1 mix in Dolby TrueHD as well as the original stereo mix in PCM. The transfer worked off of a new telecine print. Sadly, there’s no North American Blu-ray release in the works.
Check out our review of the film here.
Plot concept: Chiyoko Fujiwara was once a major movie star who dominated the Japanese cinema world. Thirty years ago, she abruptly disappeared from the screen and public view.
One of her greatest admirers, Genya Tachibana, is a documentary filmmaker who has traveled to the isolated mountain lodge where she makes her home to interview her. There, he presents her with an old key, and as if they key had opened a door to her memories, Chiyoko starts telling the story of her life, interweaving moments from her past and future and passing through the boundary between reality and the movies that had made up so much of her life.
[thanks to the tip from rootsofjustice]
