“Electric Shadows” Film Chat

Final episode in the Satoshi Kon mini-season. Yimi and Spencer close out the trilogy with Paprika (2006) — a team of psychiatrists invents a device, the DC Mini, that lets people enter each other's dreams. When the devices are stolen, dreams begin merging with reality and the boundary holding the city together starts to collapse. They talk through the Inception comparison everyone makes, why anima...

Satoshi Kon mini-season, episode two. Yimi and Spencer discuss Millennium Actress (2002) — a documentary crew visits a reclusive former actress, and her memories pull them inside the films she made across a lifetime. If Perfect Blue was about identity written by others, this one is about identity written by desire. They cover the key and what it actually unlocks, the Sisyphus reading of the final...

Perfect Blue and Parasocial Horror: Kicking Off an Electric Shadow Satoshi Kon Mini-SeasonElectric Shadow hosts Yimi and Spencer begin a three-episode Satoshi Kon series by discussing Kon’s 1997 film Perfect Blue, following their prior episodes on Linklater’s Before Trilogy. They outline the plot about Mima, a former pop idol transitioning into acting, and frame the film’s dense themes: idol cultu...

Electric Shadow Discusses Linklater’s Before Sunrise Hosts Yimi and Spencer introduce their podcast Electric Shadow, which focuses on long conversations about films rather than reviews, and discuss Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise while watching the trilogy backwards. They compare their first and current viewings, focusing on Jesse and Celine’s immediate mutual attraction, naturalistic dialogue,...

For our third episode, we're in the middle of the trilogy and the middle of the afternoon, in Paris, in real time. Before Sunset (2004) gives Jesse and Céline one hour and a half. They haven't seen each other in nine years. He has a flight to catch. They walk. We watched this one already knowing where they end up — which changes everything. This is the most rewatched film of the three for...

We started Electric Shadows with the toughest film in the trilogy. Before Midnight is the third Linklater Before film — the one most people find difficult to sit with. Jesse and Céline are together now, in Greece, with kids and years of accumulated life between them. The romance of Before Sunrise is long gone. What's left is something more honest, and more uncomfortable to watch. We rewatched...

For our first episode, we picked the movie that — between the two of us — has the strangest origin story. Night Is Short, Walk on Girl (Masaaki Yuasa, 2017) follows one unnamed girl through a single night in Kyoto — a drinking contest with a possibly immortal old man, a used book fair with a god who hates auction prices, a guerrilla theater with a playwright who won't change his pants, and a c...