Roland E. Zwick
Full-length feature films that are really just compilations of shorter movies - usually revolving around a single topic or theme - tend not to work out all that well in the long one. Either the limited running time afforded to each individual story results in characters and plot lines that are too sketchy and underdeveloped to fully capture our interest, or the quality of each individual part varies so wildly that the movie as a whole fails to satisfy. After "Paris je t'amie" a few years back and "Tokyo!" now, it would appear that, at some point, every "exotic" city will have a multi-part cinematic valentine to call its own. And whereas "Paris, je t'aime," not surprisingly, applied a romantic patina to its setting, "Tokyo!," also not surprisingly, has opted for a more sci-fi and metaphysical-oriented approach in exploring its locale. In the first tale, "Interior Design," directed by Michel Gondy, Akira and Hiroki are a young couple who have come to the city to look for work and a place to live. He's an avant garde filmmaker, she his part time assistant and fulltime girlfriend. The movie deals with the tension that develops between not only Akira and Hiroki over finances and their future together but between the couple and the female friend whose cramped apartment they're all staying in at the moment. Then, just at the point where all is beginning to seem hopeless, Hiroki involuntarily turns into a chair. You were expecting something different, perhaps? "Interior Design," is of interest primarily in the way that it goes from the prosaic to the surreal without the slightest transition or warning. It's amusing to watch as the characters' lives suddenly come to parallel the movies he makes and the imaginative scenarios they are constantly playing out in their relationship. That one of those scenarios suddenly turns out to be real - or is it? - is all just a part of the game. The second episode, "Merde," directed by Leos Carax, is even more over-the-edge in its content than "Interior Design." Denis Lavant plays a grizzled sort of man/creature in a green suit who emerges periodically from his home in the sewers to terrorize the understandably distraught citizens who inhabit the world above. Unsure of how to cope with such a menace, the Japanese government calls in a French lawyer with a goatee that perfectly matches the creature's to help with the crisis. Unfortunately, this highly stylized segment becomes a grueling, heavy-handed polemic against racism, xenophobia and capital punishment, devoid of charm, grace or even a modicum of entertainment value. Luckily, in terms of quality, things pick up considerably with "Shaking Tokyo," easily the best of the bunch in both consistency and style. Imaginatively directed by Bong Joon-ho, "Shaking Tokyo" is a lyrical and poetic tale of a "hikikomori" - a person with a pathological phobia of leaving the house - who has to figure out what to do when he falls in love with a woman who, after meeting him once, turns into a hikikomori herself. Thus, as with many of these omnibus movie packages, "Tokyo!" becomes, ultimately, a thing of bits and pieces, of two episodes that work and one that doesn't (not a bad ratio as these things go, actually). My advice, therefore, would be to watch parts one and three and skip part two altogether.
8thSin
I knew it was a series of short films by foreign directors, but I expected something better from the all-star Japanese cast in these films.The first segment "Interior Design" is a total trash. The two main characters' behaviors were completely un-Japanese and ludicrous. The 'spin the umbrella and jump' joke was so anime, it probably was copied from an anime series. The whole presentation with the chair and heroine was so generic that it felt like a work of a film school student trying to be creative, much like the failing filmmaker in this movie.The second segment "Merde"'s opening sequence was very solid, but the Gojira theme music playing in the background was ridiculous, and shows how little research was done on Tokyo and Japan for this film. The second havoc scene was produced with so little care that one of the dead victims was clearly breathing. The director also went overboard with the fake language and the crazy gesture that came with it. The actor who played Merde was brilliant, but the French lawyer's acting was so fake and corny. This short film would've been much better with more Merde action.The third segment, "Shaking Tokyo" was the only short film that had anything remotely related to exploring characteristics unique in Japan. I guess being the closest neighbor of Japan, a Korean director was the only one of the three who were qualified to describe Tokyo in a short film, and the only one who did any kind of research. Cinematography, Kagawa Teruyuki's narration, and depiction of this atypical (very organized) hikikomori were all really well-done, but the special effects in the Earthquake could've been done much better. This short film deserved much more budget since it starred A-list of Japanese acting like Kagawa Teruyuki, Aoi Yuu, and Takenaka Naoto. Although I liked the style of this film, it was too different from the previous two art-house style short films that created inconsistency as a whole.I guess this anthology was made for Western audience, but the first two segments were a joke to anyone familiar with Tokyo and Japanese films. In fact, those two films absolutely didn't need to be set in Tokyo or Japan. Only the Korean director made any attempt to tackle an issue of Japanese society. Considering the all-star cast these short films managed to gather, these short films were nothing but complete and utter failure.
Joseph Sylvers
"Tokyo!" is a three-way with Michel Gondry, Leos Carax, and Joon-ho Bong, re-inventing Japans great city as modern fairy tales. Three fantasies of alienation, form into the most unique, original, and entertaining film of the year so far. Gondry is up first with an adaption from a comic book by Gabrielle Bell "Cecil & Jordan in NewYork"(surprised was I, cus its one of my favorite stories by her, I did a presentation on it and everything) here retitled as "Interior Design". The two collaborated on the screen play, and it shows in a return to form, from his last good natured but slightly flat, "Be Kind Rewind". The story is of a couple who move to Tokyo, to screen an experimental film. The director is the boyfriend, and his girlfriend is his editor, transport, and support, though he claims she lacks ambition. They are looking for an apartment, and staying with a friend in a one room apartment. The boyfriend finds a job, the girlfriend looks for an apartment, job, and place to fit in becoming more marginalized all the time, until she begins to transform into...someone useful. Shades of "The Bedsitting Room" can be found here, but Gondry's trademark visual style is in full effect, featuring some amazing special effects, and fun set designs. It asks, Is it more important to be defined by what one loves, or what one does? Caravax's segment, called "Merde" is about a creature, like an overgrown Leprechaun, who crawls up from the sewer and begins accosting random people on the streets, eating flowers and money, licking and shoving anything and anyone who crosses his path, all to the theme of the original Godzilla. Needless to say he becomes an overnight celebrity(in Japan Sada Abe became a celebrity after murdering and removing the genitals of her lover, she played herself in plays about her life after she got out of prison, and this was before WW1. Nowadays the people photograph their monsters with camera phones). The creatures rampages turn violent, in one thrilling and especially horrific scene, and he is arrested and put on trial. The reason this is the weakest of the three, is because the creature speaks a gibberish language, and during an interrogation scene, we have about five minutes of gibberish talk, not translated til the following scene, its not really funny or dramatic, just kinda tiresome and awkward like a Monty Python skit dragged out too long. Its easy to point to terrorism and racism as the grand theme here, "he's linked to Al Queda and the Aum Cult", etc, but misanthropy in general works just as well, and is in keeping with the alienation that courses through all of the stories. Denis Lavent's performance is the best in the film, he manages to make the most inhuman character real, somewhere between Gollum and a homeless paranoid schizophrenic. It's similar to an early Gondry short film actually, where Michel takes a s*%t in a public restroom and David Cross in a turd suit follows him around claiming to be his son and shouting racial slurs at passerby's, til he eventually outgrows his s%&t cocoon and emerges from it in full Nazi uniform to Gondry's dismay. On the note of rampaging monsters, the final film is from Joon-ho bong, director of "The Host", called "Shaking Tokyo" about a hermit or hikikomori as they are a called in the land of the rising sun. A man has not left his house in ten years, having only human contact in weekly visits from a pizza man, whom he never looks in the face, has his delicate life jostled when an earthquake renders an attractive pizza-girl unconscious, and he is forced into direct contact. Eventually he resolves to leave his house to find her again, only to discover, or for us to discover the world is not as we remember it. Its an painfully funny but true idea (like Mike Judge's Idiocracy), that in the future, the final frontier of a technological society will become actual face to face interactions between human beings. Any of these stories would feel at home in an issue of Mome or a Haruki Marukami book of short stories, they are vibrant, whimsical, modern fantasy, that are almost so universal in their simplicity they could be told anywhere. The movie could take place in any city really, with some tweaking, but the stories do resonate specially with Tokyo. Its the best thing I've seen in a theater this year, I was smiling continuously throughout. Its 2 hours, but it goes by like lightning. Some of the stories may seem slight at first, so entertaining, it cant but be meaningless. But this ain't the case, each director brings something unique to the table, like another under-seen triptych of recent, the Atlanta made horror film "The Signal", "Tokyo!'s" directors feel like a band, jamming together more than separate artists trying to upstage each other, like in something like "Paris Je'Taime". Funny, charming, dynamic, strange, sincere, absurd, movie making. A place of robots, amphibious mutants, monstrous trolls, magical transformations, and to quote Merde "eyes which look like a woman's sex". Two Frenchmen and a Korean, re-invent Japan the city which upgrades itself more than any other, and we are all the better for it. What a strange bright future we live in.
