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Under discussion:

New York Stories  (1989)

Lovers on the Bridge  (1991)

Pola X  (2000)

The Host  (2007)

Paris, je t'aime  (2007)

Tokyo!  (2009)

The producers of Tokyo!, three short films by two Frenchmen and a South Korean, aim to do for Japan’s metropolis what New York Stories did for the Big Apple or Paris Je T’Aime for the City of Lights. That the two Frenchmen are indie darling Michel Gondry and former film critic/Pola X director Leos Carax, and the South Korean Bong Joon-Ho, who made an international splash with The Host, would seem to lend these three very different takes on a single subject some serious cache. Unfortunately, only two directors rise to the occasion, leaving a gaping hole in an otherwise thoughtful trilogy.

Not surprisingly, of the three directors it’s the warped Gondry, whose specialty is visualizing that fine (often nonexistent) line between life and art, who most throws himself into the task of translating the pulse of the city to the screen, via his newly-arrived protagonists Akira and Hiroko in “Interior Design.” Overstaying their welcome couch surfing at a friend’s cramped studio, they look for dead-end jobs and at cheap apartments (one of which contains a dead cat), the camera moving at typical Gondry speed, from fast motion overhead shots to slow pans, like a fractured subconscious. In the process the self-involved Akira (who pitches concepts to his girlfriend in lieu of engaging in conversation) watches his film career take off after he screens his Metropolis-like feature at a porn house, while the unsure Hiroko (played by Ayako Fujitani who happens to be the daughter of Steven Seagal) struggles to find her own identity.

It’s like listening inside the director’s own head as the pair roam the bustling streets, arguing about Hiroko’s “hobbies” not being dreams or ambitions. “What’s the difference?” she wonders, to which Akira replies, “You have to be able to define who you are in the world by what you do.” But when the purposeless Hiroko acquires the ability to physically transform like a character straight out of a Cronenberg flick, becoming both metaphorically “invisible” and useful, Gondry’s press notes claims of Polanski’s Repulsion and The Tenant as influences, eerie string and woodwind score aside, loses any legitimacy. Gondry is just too warmhearted a filmmaker to pull it off – he doesn’t have the ruthlessness required to delve into such psychological terror. Yet for capturing the essence of this Tokyo, that very warmth feels oh-so-right.

Unfortunately, French provocateur Leos Carax plows through his version of Tokyo with a ruthless arrogance akin to his bogeyman protagonist, named “Merde” (a title as clichéd as his Japanese sewer monster, played by Denis Lavant of Lovers On The Bridge, that also goes by the French word for “shit”). After opening with a slow pan of the city’s buildings set to ominous music, an overhead shot takes in a manhole, up from which pops Lavant looking like Larry Fessenden on the very worst of days. A shaky handheld camera captures the half man-half beast’s acts of gratuitous mayhem on the streets as he rips food from people’s hands, licks innocent passersby (the footage captured on cell phones makes the evening news, of course). Merde’s relatively harmless afternoon acts escalate to nighttime Molotov cocktail-throwing – with the monster skipping over the bloodied carnage like a playful kid – but despite the wondrously composed shots, Carax’s story is as empty as the tunnels in the beast’s underground lair. And once the creature is captured and forced to stand trial, leading the media to go on a feeding frenzy of its own, a mysterious lawyer from France who speaks Merde’s language (including body unfortunately) arrives in Tokyo to defend him – and, it would seem, to drive the audience mad.

Luckily for the pompous lawyer, Carax’s Tokyo is really just another version of France. As the hand-held camera that sways with the sewer man and his barrister becomes more and more grating, and the insane conversations between the two reach the realm of experimental theater workshop, Carax just keeps on obliviously rolling along (often showily using three frames onscreen simultaneously). Without any specific cultural touchstone the Tokyo courtroom – like the film itself – could be set anywhere. Indeed, the fact that Carax chose to import a French lawyer (played by Jean-Francois Balmer) to defend a creature embodied by a French actor makes “Merde” more of a French film than any exploration of Tokyo. Even the street protest by Japanese ultranationalists (Japanese ultranationalists?) to call for Merde’s hanging is downright Parisian, the pitiful creature not an international bogeyman, as Carax suggests, but rather an accidental stand-in for western imperialism. The end title card even reads that, “The Adventures of Merde in New York” is coming soon. Undoubtedly via Air France – for “Merde” says a shit-load more about its enfant terrible director than it does about Japan.

The final part of Tokyo!, Joon-ho’s “Shaking Tokyo,” is the least earthshaking and the most quietly profound. In voiceover the male protagonist, a “hikikomori” (shut-in) describes life inside his apartment as the camera drifts about the tiny yet organized flat, exquisite lighting tapping into the pathos of shadows. “The first eye contact in eleven years,” the nameless man says upon the arrival of a cute pizza girl, but as the middle-aged recluse pays for the delivery an earthquake rattles the room and the young woman collapses in his doorway. After running around in a panic he discovers a circle tattoo on her arm that reads “coma” below it, and literally pushes her button to wake her. Once she’s revived and gone the modern urban fairytale escalates as the hermit is forced to venture into the blinding sunlight of the big bad world to find his mysterious princess.

But unlike Gondry’s rushing Tokyo, Joon-ho’s claustrophobic quarters give way to spacious empty streets (though unlike Carax’s “Merde” the sense of space and place is apparent and palpable in both their films). After running through the streets accompanied by a lovely, light guitar score – peeking in the windows of other recluses – he finally finds the pizza girl (now hikikomori!) of his dreams, begs her to come out through the bars of her window. As self-imprisonment gives way to another earthquake, as the man pushes her “button” for love, which leads to yet another earthquake, this visualization of emotion allows the film to transcend a city and a specific cultural phenomenon to become as universal as the “dissolution of love” story at the heart of Gondry’s “Interior Design.” Now if only immature Carax hadn’t rudely interrupted the deep dialogue between these two companion pieces Tokyo! would shine like the city’s brightest neon sign.

Under discussion:

Forrest Gump  (1994)

Director Zack Snyder has succeeded in doing the impossible: he has adapted the “unfilmable” graphic novel, Watchmen, to the screen. While there’s no doubt that he has made the movie with surprisingly little deviation from the source material, that doesn’t mean he has made a good film. In many ways, Watchmen is a case study in the inherent differences between the comic page and the screen. Success on screen, even if the adaptation is faithful, is not guaranteed.

The story (in case you didn’t piece it together from the constant barrage of trailers and posters clogging the internet since last summer) revolves around a group of costumed super heroes whose fates intertwine with the events of the twentieth century. Set in an alternate 1985, the world is on the brink of nuclear holocaust. The action is set in motion by the murder of The Comedian (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), a retired hero with dubious morals. The outlawed heroes fight to avert impending doom, and spur to action the only one among them with the power to single-handedly save the world, Dr. Manhattan. Played by a blue CGI mock-up of a naked, impossibly ripped Billy Crudup, Dr. Manhattan is the result of an experiment gone wrong. He is the only hero with supernatural powers, which are inconceivably vast, and has become the lynchpin in the United States’ defense strategy against the Soviets. His powers have gradually separated him from the plight of humanity, illustrated by his failing relationship with Silk Spectre II (Malin Akerman), a sexy, second-generation heroine.

There’s a concern that the web of back-stories and sizable cast of characters could render the film inaccessible to those who haven’t read the graphic novel. On the contrary, I think the Watchmen virgins are at an advantage going into the film. Snyder covers a dizzying amount of material, staying true to the core of the original story even while making some significant cuts. For Watchmen fans, I think the problem is not the cuts, but rather the treatment of some of the material that’s left in. Hollywood seems to assume that comic books are ready-made storyboards, in need only of several million dollars of CGI to come to life. In many ways, Watchmen is a collection of examples which show why the formula is much more complicated than that.

The opening credits stride through several decades of alternate history, showing how the Watchmen, and their predecessors the Minutemen, fit into American history. Rather than produce old-looking photos, or depict Dr. Manhattan shaking JFK’s hand in the grainy film of the day, a la Forrest Gump, Snyder sets up nearly still live action scenes. The camera pulls out of these mostly frozen moments, giving a nostalgic feeling of living within the photos. It’s a nice effect, but it’s also extremely fake looking. There’s something very odd about seeing actors you know were told to hold very still, like they’re faking slow motion. At first this really turned me off, but then I began to like it. As the montage went on, it began to feel self-consciously fake, as if these scenes are not depictions of the actual events, but rather glorified memories, existing only in the minds of aging super heroes.

After the credits, the film continues to make drastic jumps in tone and pace. Some of these work quite well, while others do not. About half way into the film, after being pulled in repeatedly by stunning sequences and shunted back out by unsuccessful ones, I found a pattern: the movie works really well when it doesn’t try to be an actual movie. Many passages, the majority of the film even, are a delight to watch. But when the film needs to slow down and just let a scene play, a scene which needs no visual flourishes but is still important, it seems bored with itself. A perfect example is The Comedian’s burial. Rather than inner-cut wide shots of somber figures gathered around the grave with contemplative close-ups, Snyder instead decides to use movie magic to make the camera fly from a tight shot of a stone angel statue back, back, flying over the mourners, cutting through the rain, until the camera itself passes through an impossibly small hole in a wrought-iron sign that reads “Cemetery.” Scenes like this made me wish Snyder could have somehow kept the entire film in music video mode, where it really sings.

For every dramatic visual improvement the film offers, there’s a lack-luster chunk of dialog that sounds as though the actors are reading the comic aloud. There’s plenty of voiceover, the filmic version of comics’ ubiquitous narration boxes, with Dr. Manhattan and Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley), a grizzled anti-hero with a simmering contempt for the city he’s trying to save, each narrating portions of the film. Alan Moore, who wrote the graphic novel but has distanced himself from the film, penned passages that are now canonical in the graphic novel world. These passages are adhered to where ever possible, which works in certain scenes, but in others the translation to screen feels awkward. Some of Rorschach’s ponderings, which come off as masterpieces of noir prose in the book, feel hokey here. While Dr. Manhattan’s voiceover, with an epic calmness, makes his scenes some of the strongest in the film, due in no small part to Crudup’s stellar voice work.

Plenty of scenes are given the justice they deserve, but others, particularly near the beginning, feel like the abridged version. In particular, a dialog between The Comedian and Dr. Manhattan in a Vietnam bar, a key foreshadowing of the central conflict the blue demi-god faces, plays like a sped-up dress rehearsal. Ozymandias, a hero who has cashed in on his fame and turned his attention toward global energy reform, underscores the futility of placing humanity’s hope in Dr. Manhattan. If the full volley of Soviet nukes come, he explains, “even Dr. Manhattan can’t be everywhere at once.” Watchmen, as thorough an adaptation as it is, suffers from the same fate. It can’t be everywhere at once. In some ways, it’s too complete a retelling of the graphic novel, as it sets itself up for easy panel-to-scene comparison, making the film’s inadequacies that much easier to measure.

It’s clear that Snyder has found a kindred spirit in Dr. Manhattan. As Silk Spectre II distances herself from her big, blue, supernatural lover, she says a line that could just as easily be meant for the director himself, “You know how everything fits together, except people.”