The Pillow Book

Rating:
Summary: Sex vs violence,love vs anger,desire vs revenge,who wins?
Review: Nothing much to be said. The story is told in Greenaway's unique "chapteristic" way.The set is beuatifully designed and decorated. I just love to see the bathroom scene over and over, it is my ideal place to be. Peter Greenaway will always be one of my favorite ditectors. Watching this film is like looking at series of surreal paintings.

Rating:
Summary: The Pillow Book is a majestic work of art
Review: I saw The Pillow Book in Cape Town, South Africa and was in awe of it, which led me to watch it some 10 times afterwards on video. This is a work of art, and well worth watching. Because of the density of the plot, enhanced by the historical cross reference to Sei Shonagon's pillow book written a thousand years ago, and the "screen within a screen" film technique, it is perhaps a good idea to read the original pillow book on which the movie was based. Published by Penguin, and titled The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon, this beautiful book affords the reader a insightful glimpse into the time of the Japanese Empire and enriches one's experience of the movie. McGregor and Wu's performance in the movie are excellent. See this movie.

Rating:
Summary: Artsy-fartsy garbage.
Review: Couldn't understand the hype and praise about this smothering piece of forgettable artsy-fartsy film. My friend and I could not wait to get out of the movie. Sensory overload, pseudo-intellectual/historical overkill, a morass of images and cacophonies---please, spare us and other hapless victims this unnecessary cinematic trash.

Rating:
Summary: the body as text
Review: an incredible dream brought into visual reality by some very gifted people, the pillow book is lush, stunning, disconcerting. nagiko, her own skin used as text/canvas by her father, uses the skin of lovers and strangers to give voice to her desire, anger, hope. flawless in imagery and execution, yet the characters are tragically blind and self-destructive. still, one of the most beautiful movies i have ever seen.

Rating:
Summary: A stark look at the depths of human passion
Review: The film left me breathless. The movie lets you in a surreal world of calligraphy and it's passion. This passion has the power to drive even lovers to madness. This film focuses on the need of man for visceral stimulation and how eroticism can take so many forms. The use of multi frames will provide the viewers with windows to other facets of the film and more importantly to the characters' complex nature. This film invited us to one Asian girl's journey to sexual awakening amidst the corruption and deceit her childhood utopic world once presented. This is a story of vengeance, of deception, of betrayal and of love. This film will take you in a magical journey into an almost unfamiliar dimension which lets you vicariously explore your personal desires in life. Lastly, this film will take you in with every brushstroke that caresses the screen. See it and be left breathless.

Rating:
Summary: A porn movie but 'Artistic'
Review: Highly over-rated. It's like when an artist pisses and ejaculates over a picture and calls it 'nature', then people go 'ooooh aaaaaah!such genius!'. That pretty much summarises it.

Rating:
Summary: I love Ewan, but not this film
Review: I'm quite surprised to find so many 5 star reviews of this "erotic" film. I chalked it up to Ewan being quite young & desperate, not yet a star, to appear in such a laughable film. Perhaps I just don't find full frontal nudity of Asian men that attractive, but it was a silly premise writing all over each other. I love artsy, weird foreign films, but unfortunately my husband tires of them, especially when I bring home ones like this.

Rating:
Summary: The Pillow Book
Review: this film goes well beyond the narrow norms/confines of erotica; for it stirs one's senses - takes one to another level - of how we look at enjoy and appreaciate the art of love(making)

this film is both beautiful, subtle, alarming and invigorating ... intense ...

peter greenaway really captured the very depths of what lies buried within (some of) us.

for me, this is certainly one of my all-time best movies pertaining to the complex subject of love.



owen - an art/love connoisseur

Rating:
Summary: L ange vole ... l homme change
Review: The Pillow Book is about book lovers. You might think you are a book lover, but this film takes the concept, deconstructs it and takes it beyond your sensibilities Ð well my sensibilities, anyway. It pushes the envelope Ð and whatever the envelope ever was. Greenway is not for your standard pop-corn munching movie watcher. There is a shock or two, less than in The Cook. I will tell you that his storytelling is unique, operating on very quirky logic about love (although very poetic about parental love), vibrant in a celebration of perceived good provoking its world of nightmarish opposites. The characters are not very appealing spirits, but their motivations are interesting. This story is told in layers of images, the past folding on the present, reverence in battle with sacrilege, and life hiding in very stylized art. Moving images are appliqued over other movie frames. It is like opera. There are a lot of arias for the eyes and some beautifully haunting music for the ears. At times, like in an opera the images sing together. The erotic nature of the film is not just the nude bodies making love but the language and how it lives as a fetish and aspired toward immortality or mythology. My knowledge of Asian culture is very little, but The Pillow Book has indelibly taught me something, except I need to translate from the Japanese, the Chinese, the English, the Yiddish and the Greenway.