Movie Details
| Title: | Tokyo! | |
| Director: | Michel Gondry, Jeos Carax, Joon-ho Bong | |
| Year: | 2008 | |
| Genre: | Drama | |
| Times Seen: | 1 | |
| Last Seen: | 09.19.08 |
Other Movies Seen By This Director (0)
| Date Viewed | Venue | Note |
| 09.19.08 | Alamo South Lamar | This Screening is part of event: FantasticFest 2008 Day two starts mid-afternoon, which is good because I have to pack a weekend full of chores into one morning... ok so I only did one load of laundry but whatever. Getting my ticket numbers, I come to realize that the VIP advantage of picking your tickets up the day beforehand is pretty huge. Since it's already 3, i'm in the 50s for everything tomorrow. This ticketting system makes for more pandemonium in the lobby and pretty much eliminates any last-minute changes based on feedback (which makes any idle chit-chat with the festival-goers I see once a year pretty much a moot point since it's probably too late to re-arrange my schedule to fit anything else in) but knowing where you're at in the seat count is pretty nice. Anyway, I wanted to see this anthology about Tokyo pretty much just for Michel Gondry's segment. While I still like most of what Gondry's released theatrically, I still think he has yet to fully nail something with the same innovative perfection of his music videos. It'd help if he made something with a happy ending. Anyway, his name got me in the door so I can't say I regret watching this, but... All three stories felt too long to me and went in weird arbitrary directions that made no sense. The closest I came to actively liking it was the beginning of Leos Carax's story titled Merde, where - to the tune of Destroy All Monsters score - a weird guy with a crooked goatee and an ill-fitting green suit crawled out of the sewer and walked down the street with a random sense of mayhem. He steals flowers from girls and eats them, steals a guy's wallet and takes the money out and eats it, walks up to a teenage girl and licks her armpit; all in pretty much one continuous shot, all while doing an odd walk and making weird grunting sounds. Then he climbs back into the sewer. Cut to a news studio with two anchors looking serious. The headline: Tokyo is afraid. For those 4 minutes I thought it was great. Some sort of homage to the Honda monster movies and statement about the passivity of Tokyo's people, maybe even a comment on American imperialism to boot, why not. But no, then we have to follow the guy around in the sewers until he discovers old bunker grenades which he uses to kill and mutilate scores of innocent bystanders and a protracted courtroom scene follows with a weird French guy who shares his language, goatee, and unclipped fingernails. They talk in their little fake language for like 15 minutes. It's stupid. So anyway, didn't really enjoy it too much but I'm glad to have seen it. All three stories border on interesting but ultimately don't come together for me at all. |
